Sharks embody several major aspects of modern marine management: they are traditionally antagonized, exploited or by-caught by humans, typically vulnerable to extirpation, pursued as luxury food, yet valued as wildlife and essential as top-down regulators in marine food webs. Due to their generally large size, elusiveness, high mobility, and potentially dangerous nature, elasmobranchs pose substantial technical challenges to biodiversity monitoring, which prompted recent efforts to harness the power of environmental DNA (eDNA) as a noninvasive survey method for these taxa. Here we deployed an elasmobranch-specific metabarcoding assay to characterize shark and ray diversity around Reunion