Saving Seafood

FLORIDA: Gov. DeSantis signs measure banning import and export of shark fins

September 21, 2020 — Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed a measure into law banning the import and export of shark fins in Florida.

Sen. Travis Hutson sponsored the bill (SB 680), but the measure is named after the late Kristin Jacobs. She sponsored the House version of the bill (HB 401). Jacobs passed away in April — almost exactly one month after the Legislature approved the legislation — after a yearslong battle with cancer.

“This bill’s really important to the state,” Jacobs said as the Legislature approved a final version of the bill.

Jacobs prioritized banning the shark fin trade. Toward the end of the legislative process, Rep. Toby Overdorf offered an amendment renaming the bill the “Kristin Jacobs Ocean Conservation Act.” That amendment was approved.

“It was an incredible honor and privilege to help Rep. Jacobs across the finish line with this bill,” Overdof said. “The aptly named Ocean Conservancy Act allows her advocacy for the environment and for bipartisan relationships to continue long after her passing.”

Read the full story at Florida Politics

International Crime Ring That Trafficked in Shark Fins Is Dismantled, U.S. Says

September 8, 2020 — Shark fin soup, considered a delicacy in some countries, has long fueled demand for illegally harvested fins. But federal authorities in Georgia announced this week that they had dismantled at least one source for the ingredient: a multimillion-dollar organization they described as an international money laundering, drug trafficking and illegal wildlife trade ring.

A dozen people, including Terry Xing Zhao Wu, 45, of Burlingame, Calif., and two businesses on opposite ends of the country face multiple charges, including fraud and money laundering, for their roles in what the authorities called the “Wu transnational criminal organization,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia said in a statement on Thursday.

“United with our partner agencies, we have shut down an operation that fed a seemingly insatiable overseas appetite for illegally traded wildlife, and seized ill-gotten assets derived from that despicable criminal enterprise,” Bobby L. Christine, the U.S. attorney for the district, said in the statement.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Federal charges filed in a 2018 shark fin trafficking case

September 1, 2020 — Hamada Suisan Co. Ltd., the owner of a Japanese-flagged fishing vessel, was charged in federal court Monday tied to the illegal trafficking of shark fins.

The charges of aiding and abetting the attempted export of shark fins stems from a November 2018 discovery of hundreds of fins in the possession of workers from the fishing vessel, M.V. Kyoshin Maru No. 20.

According to the Department of Justice, the vessel’s Indonesian workers legally came to Hawaii to board flights out of the Honolulu International Airport. During routine TSA screenings of carry-on luggage, agents found some 962 shark fins within their bags, weighing in approximately 190 pounds.

Read the full story at Hawaii News Now

Shark fin stories by major media ‘misleading’: Q&A with David Shiffman

July 14, 2020 — If there’s one thing most of the public knows about shark conservation, it’s that they’re under siege by global fleets of vessels that scoop them up, cut off their fins and deposit them back into the ocean to drown, a cruel practice known as shark finning.

But what if that practice, while real, isn’t the singular threat it’s made out to be?

“There are many threats facing sharks, but one, which is not the biggest threat, gets the most attention,” says David Shiffman, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University who studies shark conservation.

An analysis of ten years’ worth of media reports, published in June by Shiffman et al in the open-access journal iScience, shows that two-thirds of all articles about threats to sharks focused on finning and the trade in shark fins — two separate issues that are conflated so frequently, write the authors, that “it was impossible to tease these two threats apart.”

A more pressing threat, overfishing, was mentioned in just four of ten articles. Recreational fishing for sharks, which the authors call an emerging threat, only made it into a tenth of the articles.

Critically endangered sharks, meanwhile, got a tiny fraction of the attention of the better-known species, like great white sharks. They showed up just 20 times in nearly 2,000 articles.

The result of the skewed media coverage, Shiffman says, is that “a concerned citizen learning about this important issue from newspapers would be badly misinformed,” which could lead them to support policies that, at best, won’t work.

Mongabay reached Shiffman over email for an interview that’s been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Shark fin smugglers using coronavirus as cover to ramp up illegal shipments into Hong Kong

June 12, 2020 — Conservationists in Hong Kong remain puzzled by the scale of record illegal shark fin shipments into the city this year, at a time when overall consumption is down.

The two consecutive shark fin shipments, totaling 26 metric tons (MT) and valued at HKD 8.6 million (USD 1.1 million, EUR 950,000), were seized by the Hong Kong Customs on 28 April and 4 May. An estimated 38,500 sharks were killed for the fins seized in Hong Kong, mostly from the thresher and silky shark, whose trade is regulated under the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Appendix II. None of the required permits accompanied the shark fins seized in Hong Kong.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Florida Lawmakers Send Shark Fin Ban to Governor

March 13, 2020 — Selling and possessing shark fins could soon be outlawed in Florida, joining about a dozen other states in attempting to protect sharks and remove the delicacy from restaurant menus.

The Florida Senate unanimously approved a measure already ratified by the state House, sending the legislation to Gov. Ron DeSantis for his signature.

The practice of shark finning has long been outlawed under federal law, but most states currently have no prohibitions against possessing and selling shark fins. A decade ago, Hawaii became the first state to ban the possession and sale of shark fins. Since then, about a dozen other states have enacted similar laws.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

FLORIDA: House passes shark fin ban — renamed after Kristin Jacobs — with carveout for domestic fishermen

March 10, 2020 — The House passed the Senate version of a bill (SB 680), which outlaws the import and export of fins to or from Florida.

However, one amendment was added, meaning the Senate will have to vote anew on the reconfigured bill.

Rep. Kristin Jacobs, in what may be some of her final remarks on the House floor, noted that a lot of traffic has moved through Miami due to that and other illicit trades.

“There’s no end to finding a black market for all kinds of things,” Jacobs noted, adding that shark carcasses have been used to traffic cocaine.

Shark finning is the process of catching a shark, removing its fins and discarding the shark. Shark finners usually drop the body back into the ocean, where it bleeds to death or drowns because it can no longer swim properly. The fins fetch a hefty price on the black market where they are most often sold to Asian countries.

Read the full story at Florida Politics

Shark fin ban moving through Florida legislature

February 25, 2020 — Two bills are moving through the state legislature that may impact shark conservation in Florida.

Shark-finning is the process of cutting the fins off of live sharks, then dumping the fish back in the water and leaving them to drown or bleed to death. It was prohibited nationally in 2000 through the Shark Finning Prohibition Act by then-president Bill Clinton.

But now, two companion bills in Florida – HB 401 and SB 680 from Rep. Kristin Jacobs (D-Coconut Creek) and Sen. Travis Hutson (R-Palm Coast) – are planning to ban the possession and sale of shark fins on a state level. The bills aim to the move the lucrative shark fin industry out of the Sunshine State by banning the import and exports of shark fins.

Researchers, however, are hoping for a better solution – one that would better serve long-term shark sustainability.

“There’s really no need to eliminate the domestic industry because it’s already under heavy regulation,” Dr. Robert Hueter, the director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory, said. “It is true that there is a problem there and we don’t want to allow fins that have been acquired through the wrong way to come through the U.S.”

Read the full story at WFLA

California’s ban on shark fins doesn’t stop the trade from passing through its ports

February 25, 2020 — Three years ago, a cargo container purportedly transporting thousands of pounds of pickles from Panama was placed on a Hong Kong-bound ship that stopped at the Port of Oakland on a chilly February night. Hundreds of rectangular containers were stacked on the giant vessel like Lego blocks, but state and federal wildlife agents knew there was something fishy about this one.

Inside, the agents found nearly 52,000 pounds of frozen shark fins, cut from an estimated 9,500 sharks. A cursory inspection revealed that some of the fins were from protected species that require permits to be legally traded. So officials seized the shipment, valued at just under $1 million, making it one of the largest single shark fin seizures in U.S. history.

California may have banned the shark fin trade years ago, but the container is hardly the only one of its kind passing through the state’s bustling ports: A recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated that hundreds of thousands of pounds of shark fins from Latin America transit West Coast and other U.S. ports each year, destined to land in a bowl of shark fin soup in Hong Kong and other Asian cities.

“We think we’ve just found the tip of the iceberg, and it’s a little hard to say how big the iceberg is,” said the report’s author, Elizabeth Murdock, the San Francisco-based director of the environmental group’s Pacific Oceans Initiative.

The wildlife agents and scientists waiting for the container in Oakland on Feb. 10, 2017, had been tipped off by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, whose agents had cracked open the container at the Port of Long Beach. An agency spokesperson declined to comment on what led to the container’s initial inspection, but its contents were a far cry from the “cucumbers/gherkins” listed as the shipment’s tariff code.

The fin trade is driven by the high demand for shark fin soup, a Chinese delicacy that has caused the value of fins to skyrocket to as much as $500 a pound.

Read the full story at The Mercury News

FLORIDA: Proposed shark fin sale ban dismays fishermen

February 24, 2020 — Dave Campo has been catching sharks since he was 12. He spends his nights bobbing on the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean, waiting patiently in the dark for his catch and hauling the 80- to 300-pound fish on board his boat, the Miss Maggie, with his crew.

When the Miss Maggie docks, each shark, already gutted and beheaded, is carefully lifted out of a large icebox that takes up about a quarter of the boat. Crew member Ed Zirkel, 30, dressed in white rubber overalls and bright orange gloves, grabs a sharp knife and, from the dorsal to the lower tail lobe, systematically slices off each fin. With the rubber waders off, a thick scar is visible on the front of his leg — it’s from a shark bite.

Once the sharks’ stomachs are removed, each heavy carcass is weighed, chopped into fillets, skinned, packaged and weighed again. By the time the men have finished their work, the floors of the boat and the fish house are covered with a thin layer of watery blood.

Pending state legislation in Florida could soon quash this scene.

In the U.S., shark finning — the gruesome process of stripping living sharks of their fins, dumping the fish back in the water and leaving them to struggle for life, drown or bleed to death — has been outlawed since the Shark Finning Prohibition Act was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Dec. 21, 2000. Many states since then have also banned the import, export and sale of fins, which is different from finning, but nonetheless controversial. Two bills — HB 401 and SB 680 — are currently moving through the Florida Legislature to ban all fin sales.

Robert Hueter, director of the Sarasota-based Mote Marine Laboratory’s Center for Shark Research, said the anti-finning bills may be well-intended but would have negative consequences.

Hueter said banning the import and export of fins in Florida will merely push the illegal trade underground, preventing regulation, and promote wastefulness by forcing local fishermen to throw away the fins on the sharks they catch.

Read the full story at The Gainesville Sun