July 21, 2017 — Dave Ebert pulls up an image on his computer screen. The object in the picture is shaped like an oversize arrowhead, thin, yellowish, and fraying at its edges. It’s a dried shark fin, the key ingredient in the Chinese delicacy shark fin soup. Border officials confiscated it from someone entering the U.S.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Office of Law Enforcement in Burlingame, California, sent the image to Ebert to identify exactly what species of shark the fin came from. If Ebert determines that it belonged to a species listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an agreement to ensure that international trade of certain species doesn’t threaten their survival, the FWS will consider law enforcement action against the fin’s owner.
Ebert knows how hard it is to police this international trade, in hopes that fins that end up in restaurant kitchens have been sustainably fished. Yet he and many other shark conservation experts are skeptical about a bill before Congress, called the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act of 2017. Congressmen Ed Royce (a Republican from California) and Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan (an Independent from the Northern Mariana Islands) introduced the bill on March 9.
If the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act passes, it would terminate the possession and trade of shark fins in all 50 U.S. states and 16 territories. Already 11 states, including California, and three territories have bans in place.
Activists and advocacy groups often cheer these bans. However, many experts say that they are not the best way to help overfished shark populations recover or to stop finning-at-sea, a practice where fishers cut off a shark’s fins and throw the rest of its body overboard, often still alive but doomed. Instead, experts argue that better tracking to determine whether fins come from a stable population and whether the sharks were finned or caught whole, followed by trade restrictions on unsustainably caught fins, represent the best steps toward saving threatened shark species. Some go so far as to argue that a U.S. trade ban may do more harm than good, by crushing a domestic industry that exports sustainably caught fins to markets in Asia and allowing less-sustainable fisheries to take up the slack.
In February 2016, the journal Conservation Biology published a study reporting survey responses from 102 shark researchers from the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain. The survey asked whether the researchers supported a range of 11 different international policies, including fishing quotas, bans on finning-at-sea, listing species on CITES, and banning the trade in shark fins. Banning the fin trade, though supported by about 60 percent of the researchers, was the second least-popular option. By contrast, more than 90 percent backed the idea of sustainable fishing using strict catch quotas, the most popular choice.
“Full utilization of sharks taken in sustainable fisheries would logically require that some of the fins get used,” one of the scientists wrote in the survey. Another added: “A nationwide ban on shark fishing is unwarranted. There are populations that are capable of supporting a sustainable fishery.”
U.S. shark fisheries are already heavily regulated to protect species that, as top predators, are vital to the health of marine ecosystems. In 1993, the federal government started limiting the species and number of sharks caught. Since then, regulations have become more stringent. In 2000, officials banned shark finning in U.S. waters due to ethical and environmental concerns. Sharks are typically slow to mature and produce few offspring, making it hard to know whether the regulations have helped. However, recently some coastal shark populations have shown signs of recovery. A study published in the journal Fish and Fisheries in February found that most formerly over-exploited shark species along the U.S. east coast and in the Gulf of Mexico were on the rise, following the implementation of careful management in the 1990s.