Increased Demand for Shark and Ray Meat Threatens Entire Species
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The creatures who share the earth with humans are at great risk of disappearing, and despite man’s best efforts it appears that some species like rhinos, elephants, lions, and wolves are destined to be hunted to extinction. The same is happening to the world’s oceans. The bluefin tuna is clearly endangered and yet fishing continues for this once abundant fish. Sharks and rays are facing the same fate: extinction. Is there anything we can do about this? Probably, but it will take a global effort and that’s not likely to happen.
Reprinted with permission from TakePart.com
by John R. Platt
The world’s endangered sharks have a new threat: dinner plates.
There’s been a lot of progress in the past few years to reduce the worldwide demand for shark fins, which are often served in a Chinese delicacy called shark fin soup. That’s not the only way that sharks are consumed, however. A new 200-page report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization finds that the market for shark meat has increased an astonishing 42 percent between 2000 and 2010.
The study quantifies what many researchers had begun to suspect. “We had a sense that the shark meat trade was increasing,” said one of the report’s authors, Shelley Clarke of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission. Even so, the data surprised them, revealing new markets for shark meat that have emerged owing to globalization. “The magnitude of the increase and the extent to which it is concentrated in Brazil for shark meat, and Korea for skate and ray meat, were striking,” she said.
The total value of the worldwide trade in shark meat and fins was estimated at nearly $1 billion, according to the report.
Almost all of the world’s shark species face dramatic population declines because of decades of overfishing. Some species have lost 99 percent of their populations.
“These species are in global crisis,” said Luke Warwick, acting director of the global shark conservation campaign for The Pew Charitable Trusts, who was not affiliated with the study. “Because sharks grow slowly, mature late, and bear few young, they can’t recover from depleted populations quickly enough, especially if they continue to be killed at a rate of about 100 million, year after year.”
He said mortality rates are probably double what could be considered sustainable: “The widespread global meat and fin markets showcased in this report demonstrate the scale of the problem these top oceanic predators face.”
One unexpected cause for some of this increase is the same laws that were designed to help sharks by reducing the shark fin trade. Regulations now encourage using the entire shark instead of catching the fish, chopping off its fins, and dumping the carcass back into the ocean. The report credits anti-finning regulations along with increasing demand for shark meat—which is considered a delicacy in many countries—for what it calls a “considerable” expansion in the market.
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Shark finning increased since 1997 largely due to the increasing demand for . The meat of dogfishes, smoothhounds, cat sharks, skates and rays is in high .
While the demand for shark, ray and skate meat isn t given as much attention as shark fin, the trade has been increasing since the early 1990s and the sheer.
You’ll see several more extinction events before anything is done, and even then not much will be done. Everyone wants to get rich quick and unless the market for these products disappears the animal will.
I believe that. We are always slow to act so we end up reacting when it’s too late.
Until there are so few fishing for them becomes unprofitable they will continue as long as there is a market.