Law has hard time reeling in purveyors of ‘fish porn’

MIAMI — The trophy shot, from the grainy images that once wallpapered Florida tackle shops to the high-gloss GoPro videos vying for clicks on YouTube, is a tradition in fishing nearly as fetishized as the sport.

There’s even a name for it: fish porn.

But a video that went viral this month showing a group of Gulf Coast men dragging a battered shark behind a speeding boat exposed a subculture that may be taking the term too literally.

In their version, a gang of MTV “Jackass”-like characters talk smack about fishing online and post images of themselves taking shots at fish with handguns, swilling beer and Jagermeister from the gills of stunned or dead fish, and committing acts that may violate state and federal fishing rules.

The online outrage triggered by the nastiness is now spilling into real life. Conservationists, more enlightened anglers and wildlife agencies tracking a rising tide of violations on social media hope the backlash can curb behavior that is easy to condemn but difficult to prosecute.

“There are clearly a group of anglers who know it’s illegal,” said David Shiffman, a former University of Miami shark researcher and fellow at Simon Fraser University who this week published a study in the journal Fisheries Research about online posts by land-based shark anglers.

Over the past few decades, the fishing ethos has largely evolved to catch and release. Fishing tournaments that once called for anglers to haul in dead fish for weighing and measuring now largely rely on photographs and the honor system. Fishing regulations have followed suit, with increased protections for gamefish.

But among this “Jackass” subset, killing remains a practice, increasingly drawing the attention of law enforcement.

In 2006, Florida wildlife managers, who are now investigating the men linked to the video, created a unit devoted to crimes popping up online and expanded it in 2009. Despite a spike in cases, the unit is still small with just one state supervisor who oversees 14 investigators across six regions, pursuing Internet crimes along with their regular cases.

The agency doesn’t track the number of cases that come into the unit, or how they’re resolved, said Rob Klepper, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman. But previous stings, dubbed Operation Wild Web, highlight the difficulty in chasing internet crimes, he said.

In four stings in recent years around the state, staged over three to four days, the agency launched a total of 550 investigations, he said. Only 280 resulted in citations or warnings.

Part of the difficulty is finding them. The shark dragging video only came to light after local shark hunter Mark the Shark Quartiano, often condemned by conservationists for catching and killing sharks rather than releasing them, got messaged a copy by its creators, Michael Wenzel and Robert Lee “Bo” Benac, and posted it.