Sharks on the decline

A Great White Shark

            The global population of sharks is in drastic decline. Every year over 100 million sharks are killed for sport or human consumption. Many millions of the dead belong to critically endangered species and far to many of the rest also belong to endangered or severely threatened species. The number slaughtered is increasing every year and shows no signs of slowing as new markets continue to open and established markets expand.  There are three main fisheries that are causing the decline; commercial fishing for consumption, commercial fishing for just the fins, and sport fishing that includes trophy and tournament fishing. There are species of shark whose numbers have fallen by more than 90% in a mere decade and without any global quotas for legal fisheries the problem is only getting worse.

            

            The greatest and cruelest threat to sharks is the practice of shark fining to provide fins for shark fin soup to Asian nations. Every year around 75 million of the 100 million sharks killed are for this practice and the harvesting method is particularly cruel. As with all commercial shark fishing the method of hooking the shark is long lining. Long lining is when a fisherman sets a string of hooks, miles long with anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of hooks depending on the size of the enterprise, into the sea and waits overnight for the hooks to catch its quarry. The next day the fishermen go out, reel in the line one hook at a time to see if it has hooked anything. If it has and it isn’t a shark they simply unhook the animal, which usually dead or dying, and toss its corpse back into the sea. Millions of animals are killed as bi catch in this fashion yearly and many of the species caught accidentally are endangered: a notable example of which are endangered species of sea turtles. If the victim is a shark the fisherman hack off all of its fins as quickly as possible and toss the rest (95% of the animal) back into the sea. Far too often these sharks that have just had their fins cut off are still alive when their now finless bodies are tossed back into the sea and spend hours dying a slow and painful death on the bottom. The bodies are tossed and wasted rather than harvested because the fins are far more profitable than the rest of the body and fisherman don’t want to waste room on the boat. The level of cruelty in this practice simply cannot be overstated.

 Shark fins from a days killing

 Corpses of sharks which have been cruelly tossed back into the ocean after their fins were hacked off

            Once the fins have been brought to shore and dried they are ready to be made into shark fin soup. You would imagine that considering how expensive they are and the level of cruelty involved in their harvest shark fins would taste incredible, but you’d be wrong. Shark fin is tasteless and the flavor in shark fin soup comes from the chicken broth used in it. All shark fins add to the soup is a little bit of texture. So every year around 75 million sharks are killed so a few people can have a bit of texture in their chicken broth. Shark fin soup is a status dish, it is served either to impress company or on special occasions. Its sole purpose is to bolster a person’s ego. Making the situation worse still is that the rarer the species of shark the fin comes from the more expensive it is, so the ultra rich in the market for shark fin soup want the fins to come from great whites, tiger sharks, or other apex sharks, all of which are critically endangered. Shark fining is among the cruelest and most wasteful of ways humanity is decimating the global population of sharks.

A bowl of shark fin soup

            The west’s biggest contribution to the global cull is sport fishing.  Every year people kill millions of sharks simply to say they could. Whether through the multitude of tournaments, in which the goal is simply to kill the largest shark possible, or through private charter trophy fishing, each and every casualty to this purely ego driven practice is a tragedy.  Making the practice even more heart breaking nearly all of the sharks killed for sport are just wasted and dumped. The killer may take the trophy of the shark’s jaws but other than that the body is simply thrown away. 

 Corpses thrown away after a tournament

 A large Tiger Shark murdered for sport

            The existence of sharks in the oceans is necessary for nearly every species that calls the deep home. Sharks are apex predators: they prevent any one species from becoming to dominant and thus keep ecosystems in balance. As more and more of these stewards of the sea are taken out of the equation the predicaments the already fragile ecosystems throughout the world face are becoming more and more dire. If sharks go so does the ocean, everything in the sea is connected and sharks have been the most importantly influential group of animals in the sea for hundreds of millions of years having undergone very few changes in those eons. They are masterpieces of evolution and are necessary if any restoration of the world’s oceans is going to take place.