Shark Weighing 1,000 Pounds Caught by Texas Fishermen: 'It Was a Battle'

An enormous hammerhead shark was reeled in by two fishermen on Padre Island, southern Texas, on Friday, much to the anglers' surprise.

The fishermen spent nearly 90 minutes pulling the shark in, which measured 14 feet, 4 inches long, and weighed nearly 1,000 pounds.

"It was a battle back and forth for almost an hour and 30 minutes," Glenn Laskowski Jr., one of the fishermen, told local news KIII. "We finally were able to land the fish and get to see the true size of the monster. We quickly dehooked the fish, and got some quick pictures, then went to release the fish." Laskowski uploaded the photos of the huge beast to Facebook.

The great hammerhead is the largest of the nine species of such sharks. They can grow up to 20 feet long, and weigh as much as 1,280 pounds. Hammerheads are so-named for their characteristically elongated heads. They contain special electrical sensing organs that allow them to detect their prey via their electrical field, as well as minute chemical, physical and thermal changes.

Catching great hammerheads is not banned in Texas. This is despite the creatures being classified as "critically endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Texas Parks and Wildlife rules that a hammerhead must be a minimum length of 99 inches to be caught and retained.

These sharks have seen large population declines worldwide, mostly due to overfishing, both deliberately and as bycatch. This fishing pressure, combined with the fact that the sharks breed only once every two years, means that their populations struggle to recover. The IUCN estimates that, globally, great hammerhead populations have dropped by between 60 and 62 percent over the past three generations, or around 70 years.

However, the great hammerhead is likely not at great risk of going extinct, according to a 2014 report by NOAA Fisheries.

"The available information indicates that most of the observed declines occurred in the 1980s, before any significant management regulations," the report reads.

"Since then, current regulatory measures in many parts of the great hammerhead range are minimizing the threat of overutilization, preventing further abundance declines in the foreseeable future and decreasing the likelihood of extinction of the global population.

"Thus, we predicted that through the next 50 years, the species would be unlikely to be at risk of extinction due to trends in its abundance, productivity, spatial structure, or diversity or influenced by stochastic or depensatory processes," the report concludes.

The Padre Island pair had caught the huge fish using a 20-pound cownose stingray as bait, and waited two hours before they got a bite from the shark.

After recording their impressive catch, the fishermen then spent half an hour attempting to get the shark back into the water.

Laskowski uploaded a video of the ordeal to TikTok, in the caption of which he describes: "She died of exhaust. Unfortunately there was nothing else that we could have done to our knowledge. We had her in the current so water could flow through the gills and still nothing in that amount of time. This fish really put me and my partner JR which is also a very experienced shark angler to the test. They dont always die but unfortunately this one did."

After their attempts to return it to the sea had failed, the fishermen took the shark to be measured instead, and decided to use its meat.

"The meat was all given away and very greatly appreciated by everyone," Laskowski said. "It was a sight to see for everyone."

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