(CNN) When Dr. James Sulikowski, a professor of marine science at the University of New England, and his team was chumming the waters off the coast of Maine just after dawn July 2, they hoped to attract a porbeagle shark that they could tag and collect samples for research.

Instead, they found something much worse than they expected.

Sulikowski and members of the Maine-based Sulikowski Shark and Fish Research Lab were able to get a shark to follow their chum line to the bait. They reeled it in to secure it alongside their boat so they could begin the sampling procedure.

They'd landed a 7-foot porbeagle shark with a strip of plastic lodged around her neck.

James Sulikowski and his team found this porbeagle shark with a piece of plastic lodged around its gills.

"I immediately knew something was wrong as we were pulling her close," Sulikowski wrote in an email.

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