Fins

From a conservationist perspective, sharks are a huge problem. Certain fish like salmon have been protected for years, but until recently nobody had thought to manage the population of sharks in the oceans. They were just apex predators at the top of their food chain that kept coming up in the nets and the longlines. But ecologically, a shark is a piece of fragile china compared to most fish. One swordfish may lay a million eggs, but a shark gives birth to only 20 or so pups at a time. Some species do not begin to breed until they are 20 years old. Most fish in the ocean can reproduce quickly and stabilize their populations against the depletions of fishermen. Sharks can't.

In other words, the most deadly creature of the sea is also one of the weakest.

One hot topic at the International Pelagic Shark Workshop held in mid-February was the fate of the blue shark (Prionace glauca), a highly migratory species which can be found in most oceans, and which constitutes 95 percent of all shark bycatch. Blues multiply quicker than most species, and provide most of the shark fins for the world's soup bowls.

"People call them the rabbits of the seas," says Pikitch, "but that's not true at all."

Camhi says that even though the U.S. could institute a nationwide ban, policing the open oceans is another matter entirely. "It's a virtual free-for-all," she says.

An often-quoted scenario concerns what occurred in the food chain of a shark population off the coast of Australia. After sharks were over-fished and numbers dropped, a rise in the numbers of octopus was reported. Not having the sharks to prey upon them, the octopus began scarfing up its own prey in heightened quantities, which then led to a shortage of lobsters.

Management of shark population is trickier than it sounds. A U.S. law called the Magnuson Act was passed in 1976, creating eight regional councils, and requiring each to minimize all bycatch in federally managed waters. After fishermen swept the East Coast of the United States for swordfish, shark numbers dropped precipitously. The Atlantic fishery councils couldn't agree on how to best manage the problem, so in 1993 the federal government stepped in and instituted a permanent ban on finning within the EEZ in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean.

The West Coast of the U.S. is divided into three separate fishing councils, one for California, one for the north Pacific states, and one for Hawaii and other U.S. possessions. Having already seen its fisheries drop in population for years, California promptly followed the East Coast's lead in 1995 by banning shark finning in the waters along its coast.

In all of these U.S. waters, shark fins are allowed to be landed, as long as the whole shark comes with them. Hawaii is the only state that still allows boats to land only fins. And when it comes to finning, Hawaii will not go lightly, for a very obvious reason. The longline fishing fleet that fishes the waters off Hawaii numbers approximately 110 boats. The state falls under jurisdiction of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council. WESPAC's chairman, Jim Cook, also happens to be a commercial fisherman of the longline fleet in Hawaii.

A 1999 bill to ban finning around the islands was defeated in the Hawaii Legislature, but another is pending. WESPAC continues to negotiate with the federal government over the issue. Some would call it stalling. WESPAC admits it would rather wait until 2001, when assessments from other agencies, including the U.S. National Plan of Action for Management of Shark Fisheries, are completed, which it feels are more complete solutions to dealing with sharks in Hawaii.

Until that time, WESPAC has blatantly rebuffed the federal government's recommendations to halt shark finning. Hawaii's commercial fishing industry believes it's doing nothing wrong by finning the blue shark, which reproduces the most quickly of any shark species. The public is confusing the blue with other, more endangered coastal species like mako and thresher, the fishermen argue. There're plenty of blue sharks in the ocean. And fishermen certainly don't want a bunch of weepy-eyed liberal animal-huggers telling them what they can and can't do. Their position, essentially, is shut up and let us worry about our own fishing.

After a public relations barrage from environmental groups, as well as a directive from the National Marine Fisheries Service, WESPAC held a meeting in June, and refused to halt finning in Hawaii. Three months later, the U.S. Department of Commerce sent a letter to WESPAC urging the council to "take immediate action to ban the practice of shark finning." WESPAC again ignored the request. U.S. Congressmen, led by California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, prepared a resolution to ban "the wasteful and unsportsmanlike practice known as shark finning," which eventually passed.

An October 1999 teleconference call between WESPAC chairman Jim Cook and a U.S. House Subcommittee on Fish and Wildlife Conservation revealed the level of animosity over shark fins. Cook was blunt: "Passing this resolution sets a precedent for undermining this process by guessing that a congressman from the Midwest is better qualified to make decisions that will affect a fishery 6,000 miles away, in the case of Guam, than is a person who has lived in that territory and has been involved in that fishery at a local level."