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By Elizabeth Rosenthaw<\/p>\n
For sharks, life at the top of the ocean food chain is becoming safer \u2014 at least from human predators.<\/p>\n
The last 12 months have seen a flurry of laws, regulations and industry actions to end the international trade in the age-old delicacy, including bans on shark fin sales in Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and parts of Canada.<\/p>\n
Last week, the California Senate also voted<\/a> to ban the sale or possession of shark fins \u2014 a billion-dollar global trade that has led to the brutal deaths of tens of millions of sharks a year and resulted in many open-ocean shark species being threatened with extinction. The Bahamas and Honduras have prohibited shark fishing in the last two years.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re really enthusiastic to see good things finally starting to happen for sharks,\u201d said Elizabeth Wilson, a marine wildlife expert at Oceana, a nonprofit conservation group that has long campaigned against the trade.<\/p>\n Shark fins are used to make a coveted Chinese banquet soup that can sell for over $100 a bowl. It has the ceremonial mystique of benefiting health and virility, and serving it to guests is considered to be a sign of great honor and respect.<\/p>\n In an increasingly prosperous Asia, the market for the soup has grown drastically, causing overfishing around the globe. The presence of the once-common hammerhead in large parts of the western Atlantic, for example, has decreased by up to 89 percent over the last 25 years.<\/p>\n The spate of new protections is a result of efforts by environmental groups to reduce market demand for shark fins, because international treaties have failed to adequately curb shark fishing.<\/p>\n The Food Network recently removed all shark recipes from its offerings, and the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has been pressing Chinese restaurants in London to renounce the soup this year.<\/p>\n Even in Asia, where shark fins and soup are ubiquitous, campaigns to end shark fin dining by celebrities like the basketball star Yao Ming<\/a> of China and the conservation group WildAid<\/a> have had effects. Sales have been reduced by about one-third in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, experts say, though consumption is still growing on the Chinese mainland. Ali Baba, a kind of Chinese eBay, no longer accepts shark fin transactions.<\/p>\n \u201cThis has been a slow-boil campaign because the traditional methods failed,\u201d said Peter Knights, executive director of WildAid, which worked with Mr. Yao. \u201cWe went to consumers because it was a crisis and nothing else was dealing with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Knights pointed out that the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which restricts trade on items derived from endangered or threatened species, denied protection to five shark species last year after nations that profit from the trade voted against it.<\/p>\n Shark populations cannot tolerate intensive fishing because sharks have few offspring and often do not reproduce until they are over 10 years old. Even by conservative estimates, more than 10 million shark fins moved through Hong Kong in 2008, the main distribution center for the trade. Fins sell for over $300 a pound.<\/p>\n Many marine biologists support tougher regulation of shark fishing itself.<\/p>\n \u201cThese bans go part way, but you\u2019re still allowed to fish sharks without a permit,\u201d said John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. \u201cIn North Carolina, there are shark derbies for fun, where they are hung by their tails. We think it\u2019s O.K. to do that with this ocean predator, but we wouldn\u2019t dream of doing it to a terrestrial animal like a bear.\u201d<\/p>\n As a halfway measure to limit the fin trade, a growing number of countries, including the United States as of last December, prohibit the removal of shark fins at sea. Requiring fishing boats to take whole sharks to the dock limits the size of their catch and allows the authorities to inspect for endangered species. In the traditional shark fin trade, fishermen slice off the valued fins from a living shark and dump the still writhing body back in the water.<\/p>\n But shark-finning prohibitions are hard to enforce because they involve dockside inspections of numerous small boats and a sack of lucrative fins is easily hidden. When Dr. Bruno was at his university\u2019s new research station in the Gal\u00e1pagos Islands of Ecuador this summer, he was summoned by local authorities to help identify sharks on a boat they had seized with more than 350 carcasses, fins already partly detached<\/a>. Ecuadorean law also bans finning at sea.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was in the Gal\u00e1pagos, a national marine reserve and national heritage site,\u201d Dr. Bruno said. \u201cIf it\u2019s even happening there, that shows you the size of the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n The California ban, which has passed both chambers and now goes to Gov. Jerry Brown, would have a major impact on the availability of shark fins in the United States because most are imported from Hong Kong via California. The legislation bans imports as of Jan. 1, 2012, but allows those who possess shark fins to dispose of their stocks until June 30, 2013.<\/p>\n Though one of the bill\u2019s sponsors is Paul Fong, a Chinese-born assemblyman from Sunnyvale, some Asian-Americans in the state have objected that the measure is discriminatory, singling out an important cultural tradition. But some surveys have shown that 70 percent of Asian-Americans in California support the bill.<\/p>\n Decreasing demand from the United States and Hong Kong may not offer enough of a respite for threatened shark populations if the popularity of shark fin soup continues to grow on the Chinese mainland.<\/p>\n In a commercial made by WildAid, Asian diners at a fancy restaurant begin pushing away their soup bowls as a shark in a nearby tank bleeds from the site where his fin was removed. \u201cRemember,\u201d says Mr. Yao, the retired basketball player, \u201cwhen the buying stops, the killing can, too.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Knights, of WildAid, said that if the decimation of shark populations continued, all the money in the world would not provide shark fins for diners. \u201cThis is unsustainable,\u201d he said, \u201cand the question is, do you end it now or do you wait until there are no sharks left?\u201d<\/p>\n