This female Caribbean Reef Shark in Roatan apparently survived a finning - most do not © CC yukikokubo
Tesco have just announced that they're going to stop selling shark fins in their stores in Thailand.
This follows some bad press on the issue and subsequent lobbying by the Shark Trust to clean up their act.
Sharks are a dividing issue with people – some people love them and are fascinated by them, others are terrified of them. Whilst sharks have an ferocious and fearsome reputation, and any shark attack or alleged sightings of man-eating great whites off Cornwall make the news, we rarely hear of the impact we humans are having on sharks. And we are having an enormous impact.
Big sharks, like other big fish (swordfish, marlin, tuna, etc) are languishing at a mere 10 per cent of their numbers in our oceans compared with 50 years ago. And it's all down to humans and their appetites for fish.
Some species are killed directly, but many, many more are the unwitting victims of fishing gear aimed at something else, and are caught as bycatch. Probably the most heinous culprits are the long-lines and vast purse-seines used in tuna fisheries in tropical waters. The numbers of sharks caught and killed is huge, and in (at least) the tens of millions every year, simply ‘accidental' victims of indiscriminate fishing.
This is particularly problematic for sharks since, like skates and rays, they are different to bony fish (such as cod, salmon, sardines) in that they have relatively few babies, and take quite a long time to mature. This puts them at greater risk than fish that lay millions and millions of eggs, which can in theory replenish their numbers much quicker.
The only lucrative bit of the shark that is usually kept hold of is the fin – and these are hacked off onboard and sold at a premium for the gruesome 'delicacy' of shark fin soup. If the shark wasn't already dead, being chucked back into the water without its fins is a particularly unpleasant end. This is what Tesco's Thai stores were selling.
And Tesco were not the only high-profile shark-fin offenders. In 2005 Disneyworld Hong Kong was lambasted for serving up shark-fin soup… which was subsequently removed from the menu after pressure from Greenpeace, the Shark Trust and other groups.
Clearly we need better, more targeted ways of fishing – and we also need to make it illegal to catch sharks just for their fins.
The European Union has recently announced that it intends to step up protection of sharks in EU waters, which seems like a great step forward for our toothy friends. But, as ever, the proof of the pudding is in how well it is enforced by member states. So governments like the UK are being watched carefully to see if they practice what they preach.
Meanwhile you too can make a difference if you eat tinned tuna. As we showed in our league table last year, not every tinned tuna provider is the same. By seeking out 'pole and line' caught tuna, you can be sure that you're not causing the sharks any harm… and the easy way to do that is to buy the tins at the top of the league, own-brand Sainsbury's and Co-op.
Every little helps, you know…
