Shark Finning Comes to a Boil

Boat/US Magazine, Sept, 1999 by Ryck Lydecker

When you plunk down $100 for a bowl of shark fin soup in Shanghai or Taipei these days, chances are the fish came through Hawaii. Well, 5% of it did, anyway. Unfortunately, there's no market for the rest of the fish -- in Hong Kong or Honolulu -- so the fishing fleets that pull over 100,000 blue sharks from the Pacific each year just slice off the fins and pitch the carcasses overboard.

Some sharks are dead by the time the longline vessels retrieve their miles of baited hooks set for tuna and swordfish. But according to National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) records, 86% of the sharks, caught unintentionally in this fishery, are landed alive. For the lucky ones, a spike to the brain or a chop through the spinal cord ends its life before the fins come off.

But sometimes it's easier to winch the fish to the deck on its back, slice off the dorsal and pectoral fins and maybe the tail, cut the hook free and dump the still-living shark overboard. The helpless animal then drowns -- if it isn't eaten by another shark first.

Although anglers and conservation groups have been trying to stop this practice, which has been banned in most U.S. waters since 1993, it wasn't until earlier this year that the public outside Hawaii began to learn about shark finning.

Cash Crop

On Jan. 19, 1999, Caroll Cox stood on Honolulu's Pier 36 and watched as bale after bale of dried shark fins -- 11 tons in all -- came off the deck of the Honolulu-based fishing vessel Two Star and disappeared into a waiting truck. The cargo had been accumulated from foreign-flagged long-liners outside U.S. waters and was worth an estimated $200,000 in Hawaii. After transshipment through the state, the fins would fetch as much as $250 per pound in the Orient. And while there are few statistics on the international trade, dried shark fins shipped through Hawaii to markets in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan jumped from 22,000 pounds in 1991 to 4.5 million pounds in 1996.

When Cox, who heads a local organization called EnviroWatch, began taking pictures, one of the loaders told him to stop, so he reported the incident at the state Dept. of Lands and Natural Resources office nearby as well as to NMFS.

The pictures Cox took have since appeared in Sportfishing magazine and other angling, diving and environmental publications. They've also popped up on Web sites half a world away and as a result, finning has raised the hackles of would-be visitors to Hawaii. There's even talk of a tourist boycott of Hawaii, particularly among SCUBA divers and sportfishermen.

"While dumping live sharks without fins is barbaric, the viable issue is the waste, not the cruelty," reports Capt. Rick Gaffney, a charter boat skipper on the island of Hawaii and a frequent contributor to Sportfishing as well as associate editor of Hawaii Fishing News.

The shark has an important role as the top predator in the marine ecosystem, says Gaffney, a BOAT/U.S. member. Conservationists fear that if finning continues unchecked, whole populations of pelagic (open ocean) sharks could be fished out, upsetting the balance of the other fish species.

Bycatch Blues

According to Bob Endreson, lobbyist for the Hawaii Fishermen's Foundation and one of the leaders in the Western Pacific Fisheries Coalition (WestPac), which is trying to stop finning, Two star's 11-ton cargo accounted for some 10,000 to 15,000 blue sharks -- animals that may be 10 to 14 feet long and weigh 200 pounds -- killed only for their fins. And that was just one of 20 to 25 such shipments he estimates passed through the state last year.

Endreson says boats come into port with fins festooned in the rigging to dry and their crew members pocket about $30 per pound for fins at the dock.

"I'm not saying blue sharks are overfished. I don't know if they are or they aren't," says Endreson, a native New Yorker and sometime commercial fisherman transplanted to Hawaii 20 years ago. "But it's insane to kill an animal for less than 5% of its body weight. Responsible management doesn't allow for that kind of waste and it's prohibited under the Magnuson Act anyway."

Indeed, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, passed in 1996 after three years of lobbying by a coalition of over 100 fishing and conservation organizations, including BOAT/U.S., finally put teeth in federal fisheries management. For the first time the biological health of fish stocks and the marine ecosystem were to be put ahead of the economics of the commercial catch.

The law, under which the Western Pacific and eight other regional fishery management councils are required to operate, prohibits wasting fishery resources. Ironically, the very same law also calls for reducing bycatch, the taking of one species of fish incidental to fishing for another. And since tuna and swordfish are the long-liners' primary targets, the argument goes, the sharks they take should be finned. That way, at least part of the fish is used -- which is to say, it's no longer "bycatch."

Moreover, proponents of finning argue that blue shark stocks, which comprise over 90% of the Western Pacific catch, are not overfished, thus finning is acceptable. And since their carcasses would take up valuable hold space and there is no market for the meat of these sharks anyway, the blues are finned and discarded.