Loathed by swimmers - particularly after a highly publicized series of attacks last summer - sharks have become more popular at the dinner table in recent years.

The increasing use of shark meat, coupled with the value of the fins as the key ingredient of Asian soups, has made sharks the prized target of commercial fishers along the U.S. east coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

As a result, scientists say populations are declining rapidly. As an example, the sandbar shark, one of the most commercially popular species, has declined by about 80 percent since the 1970s, said Sonja Fordham, a fish conservation manager with The Ocean Conservancy.

"The lawsuit is intended to get the government to follow the law in terms of shark fisheries to rebuild the population," she said. "We need to manage them in a precautionary way for the public good."

The environmental groups said NMFS managers "caved" to pressure from commercial fishers by suspending reduced shark quotas that it decided on in 1999 in order to settle a lawsuit filed by the industry.

Chris Rogers, chief of the NMFS highly migratory species division, called the lawsuit "counterproductive" and said the agency was moving ahead with new stock assessments this year to come up with new commercial fishing quotas.

"Hopefully we can all agree in consensus fashion that this is best available science and move ahead with quota reductions," he said.

Despite their reputation as "trash" or "pest" fish, sharks actually need more protection than some other marine species because they grow slowly, mature late and produce few young, leaving them vulnerable to overfishing, Fordham said.

"This combination of lacking restrictions and their strained reproductive capacity leads to troubled populations not just here, but all over the world," she said.