almost all intergovernmental fishery management decisions, mandated in 2005 to stop expanding deep water fishing beyond 1,000 meters. This mandate however, does not support the main population of gulper sharks, which generally live 300–800 meters below the surface. This decision also does not stop any current deepwater fishing; it simply stops any further expansion. This is an insufficient conservation attempt, as it does not help gulper populations under stress, it simply stops more stress from accumulating. The current level of fishing may already be enough to render that population critically endangered in that region, especially considering the low reproductive rate of gulpers. Other areas of gulper shark populations have no current regulations. The Northwest Atlantic Ocean currently has no rules in regard to the harvesting of gulper sharks, and has already seen a decrease in gulper population of 80–95% since 1990. While not many laws apply to gulper sharks specifically, some blanket laws covering many different species have been created. The United States Government passed the Shark Conservation Act in 2010, which prohibited removing fins from sharks that were usually caught as bycatch and then sold to Chinese markets for shark fin soup. This law seals many of loopholes by requiring that any fins or tails brought to land must be “naturally attached to the corresponding carcass” and that no U.S. ship in foreign waters is allowed to possess shark fins. This act protects all species of sharks within 50 nautical miles of the U.S. coast. This is a much more effective law than that by the GFCM, because it addresses shark finning directly and cuts down on the amount of gulpers killed for their fins. Since this law point-blank cuts down on bycatching, it should be an effective effort at the conservation of shark species off U.S. coasts. Conservation While conservation attempts are being made, certain issues like fishery guidelines and catch verification pose problems for furthering conservation attempts. The fisheries concept is a closely regulated way to harvest gulpers, while monitoring the species population to ensure it does not crash. They generally use body mass as an indicator of when to harvest the sharks to allow growth of the population. When these ratios are incorrect, the fishery can easily crash because sharks are harvested before they can reproduce. This is especially true with the gulper shark, which has a two-year-long gestational period and a twelve to sixteen year