Shark-Fin Soup: The Uncivilized Food

Some of the most disgusting photos seen on the Internet and elsewhere are depictions of men “harvesting” shark fins. Sharks of numerous species are hauled aboard fishing vessels via baited longlines and the fins are cut off the living animal and retained for the market. The writhing shark is then thrown overboard to die a slow, painful death. Shark meat itself has little market value and is not worth the on-board freezer space or the fuel required in transporting it. The dried fins, on the other hand, are easily transported, take up little space, and command ridiculous prices in predominately East Asian markets.

All the statistics surrounding shark-finning are in staggering proportions. The numbers of sharks killed annually around the world for a bowl of unremarkable soup ranges not in the thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands, but in the tens and perhaps in scores of millions. Exact numbers are impossible to determine since shark fins take up so little cargo space and can come ashore with little tracking. The United Nations estimates that about 10 million sharks are killed each year for their fins and other products, but conservationists claim that number is far below what is actually taken, given that many nations conducting the shark-fin harvests are U.N. members whose governments financially support the industry. Some studies of the fishery estimate the take at 38 million, with others at 100 million. Remember at 52 million, we are talking about a million sharks a week pulled out of an already stressed ecosystem.

This rate of shark “take” is unsustainable. Many shark species are slow growing and may not reach sexual maturity for twelve to fourteen years. Therefore, many sharks, taken regardless of size, sex, or species, are killed before they have had a chance to go through even one reproductive cycle. Sharks are disappearing from the sea and as top predators it is their job to help maintain a balance in the ecosystem. Time after time, when humans remove predators from the natural equation, such as wolves, bears, cougars, and coyotes, the system goes all to hell. On land, deer, rabbit, squirrel, and other rodent populations soar, tear up the environment, and eliminate all kinds of natural balances. Without top marine predators, other species bloom, affecting environmental threads throughout the world. Instead of deer and rabbits we see spikes in the populations of the large, six-foot long Humboldt squid and bottom-dwelling rays, which in turn disrupt salmon and bay scallop fisheries.

The Pew Environmental Group reports that for all shark products Indonesia, India, Taiwan, Spain, and Mexico are responsible for landing the most sharks. On the civilized end of the spectrum some countries and cities have taken humane actions to limit the brutal shark fin trade.
According to the Humane Society International, Canada is working on federal legislation to prohibit the import of shark fins into the country. Also in Canada, the city of Toronto has banned the sale, possession, and distribution of shark fins or their products within city limits. Across the Atlantic, the European Union, an economic association of twenty-seven nations, has legislation pending requiring all EU fishing vessels, regardless of where in the world they fish, to have all harvested sharks landed with their fins naturally attached to the carcasses.    

How much cruelty goes into a bowl of soup? Watery soup at that, reserved for special occasions such as weddings, New Years, corporate dinners – anywhere opulence is thought appropriate. How opulent? Dried shark fins sell for about $300 a pound, a bowl of the soup for about $100. It is prepared and served not necessarily for its nutritive value or its epicurean worth. It is served as a sign of power and wastefulness. This attitude is more than an attack on shark populations, it reflects on what we condone as a species evolved from other species, with some common ancient relatives of the sharks we slaughter. We should be better than this.

In a sort of passive counter-attack – the revenge of the sharks – it seems that shark fins, because of the bioaccumulation of contaminants in food chains, carry more than their fair share of mercury. As a metal usually deposited in the seas by industrial runoff, mercury is known for its toxicity to nervous systems, so those who choose to frequently treat themselves to shark-fin soup may come to realize that that “tingling” sensation may not be due to the ecstasy of excess, but instead due to numbers of their neurons, axons, synapses, and brain cells dying as they slurp the glorious elixir. 

Parallel Overabundance: Snow Geese and Double-crested Cormorants

My previous blog discussed the relative meanings of the term “overabundance” to various stakeholder groups and touched on what was happening with snow goose populations in North America. What is amazing and what I will show is how nature repeats itself and wildlife management falls into the same repeated traps.

The double-crested cormorant, Phalacrocorax auritus, the main topic of my blog site, survived the onslaught of DDT to come back into the environment after the EPA courageously banned unregulated uses and production of the bioaccumulated insecticide. Cormorants also thrived after they were finally included in later provisions of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), protecting nearly all wild birds from unlimited shooting and feather hunters. In addition to these birds encountering cleaner water and less-toxic prey fish, on the Great Lakes where they breed in the summer, they found fantastically increased food supplies of forage fish because natural predators such as lake trout, Atlantic salmon, and others disappeared due to overfishing and pollution. At about the same time, on their wintering grounds, cormorants stumbled on and exploited a new food source in the form of farmed catfish in the South’s Mississippi Delta region. All this free-for-the-asking food at both ends of their range allowed double-crested cormorants to produce larger numbers of healthier, stronger youngsters and to stay fit and vigorous over the course of the winter for the return flight north.

The snow goose, Chen caerulescens, is a medium-sized white goose that breeds in summer arctic tundra regions in Canada, Alaska, and Russia, and migrates south in a number of fixed flyways. This goose also has a blue version that was once thought of as a different species, but proved to be merely a “morph” of the more common white form. The snow goose suffered from unrestricted hunting, reducing its numbers to about 5,000 until it was protected by the MBTA early in the twentieth century. When their numbers increased to what federal wildlife managers considered acceptable levels hunting seasons were established in 1973.What happened after that closely parallels the progression of cormorant populations.

During their southern migration snow geese once settled on marshes on both coasts to feed on the grasses and their tuberous roots. Much of that is in the past now since many of the coastal marshes are gone or greatly reduced due to commercial and residential development and urban expansion. Ordinarily, as food supplies decrease, so does the wildlife population dependent on that food. The expected decline in snow goose numbers never materialized. What happened? Humans intentionally created an alternate food source: flooded rice fields. Flooding prepares the fields to receive the next planting while at the same time provides aquatic forage for thousands of migrating snow geese. The flooded fields in fact filled with so many birds that the thousands of snow-white birds became an attraction for birdwatchers, naturalists, and the just plain curious. And not unlike the convenience of unguarded catfish ponds in the delta that supported tens of thousands of cormorants, the rice fields bolstered snow goose numbers on both coasts. More food, more birds.

Then there’s the arctic breeding ground. It is postulated that warming climates and higher tundra temperatures created improved breeding conditions resulting in more, stronger, healthier chicks ready for the rigors of a long migration. Better breeding, better birds.

The result of all this improved feeding and breeding is the proclaimed “overabundance” of snow geese. The negative effect is that the geese are literally and figuratively eating themselves out of house and home. Their dining practices of tearing grasses from the ground or marsh bottoms kills the plants, weakens the tundra substrates and increases erosion, allowing ocean tides deeper access into the marshes, virtually drowning them.

The great snow goose flocks have also crowded and pillaged the rice fields making them difficult for growers to manage and have become pests to northern farmers when they descend on corn and grain fields like falling snow, as their common name suggests.  

How do wildlife managers control the bird’s numbers? Not an easy question to answer. Several states, including New York, with the help of more flexible federal regulations, have expanded their legal hunting seasons and daily bag limits for snow geese. The problem arises that killing and dressing twenty-five geese a day quickly fills the family freezer. With about a million snow geese using the Atlantic flyway and another three million or so settling in the Rocky Mountain states, plus huge numbers in the other flyways, killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of geese may slow, but not curtail the growth in snow geese numbers. Managers faced some of the same problems in trying to reduce the two million cormorants in North America, but in the case of those birds, they are inedible, so hunting seasons to put meat on the table were never seriously considered.

One measure that was applied to reduce cormorants was the cull, in which paid “technicians” armed with suppressed (silenced) weapons brutally shot thousands of birds, often leaving wounded adults and starving chicks in their wake. The carcasses were then buried or somehow composted. All that violence to reduce cormorant numbers by mere fractions of one percent. And now, with the failure of the expanded hunting seasons, the use of snow goose culling programs is being considered, but again, with the taste for snow goose dinners waning, the slaughtered birds will probably be destined for ignoble composting.

What is the alternate solution to massacring wild birds? Just as the cause of their growth in numbers had multiple roots, the answer to snow goose “overabundance” has multiple remedies. The first of course is to do nothing. If the geese are making their breeding grounds less habitable then it’s reasonable to assume that recruitment (new individuals added to the population) will fall and the species’ reproductive capacity will reach a new reduced level. Another choice is to somehow separate the geese from their food sources during migration. Rice farmers need not flood their fields to the same extent to kill off old growth after the grain harvest. At one time growers burned their fields, but faced criticism for the added air pollution. They then decided to flood the fields instead, and to justify the use of such massive quantities of water and come down on the side of the good guys, flooded adjacent fields to provide additional habitat for migrating snow geese.

So, as the converse to “more food, more birds” and “better breeding, better birds,” wildlife managers can encourage efforts to reduce the food available in the rice fields and let the geese temporarily reduce the productivity of their own breeding grounds.

That way we can tell the “technicians” to put the guns down, stay home, and take the day off.

To respond or make a comment click "comment" below or contact me at denniswild@earthlink.net . 

Overabundant?

One of the value-laden terms applied to the double-crested cormorant is “overabundant.”  It carries a weight to it that is so subjective as to be meaningless. To whom are they overabundant? Commercial and sport fishermen? Southern catfish farmers? Bird watchers? Politicians? Conservationists? Environmentalists?

Each of these groups has their own ideas of how many is a scarcity, how many is enough, and how many constitutes too many.

·        Fishermen see breeding cormorant populations as a threat larger than overfishing, pollution and overdevelopment so a lot of cormorants are too many because the fish belong to fishermen. Simple, uncomplicated logic.

·        Catfish farmers stocking unprotected ponds with tens of thousands of fingerlings consider all cormorants, in any number, a threat to their business and none is a better population than any other.

·        To bird watchers and enthusiasts there rarely is a bird population that is too large to their liking. Birds to them are the sign of a healthy ecosystem, and greater populations signify greater natural production and protection of the outdoors.

·        Politicians look for easy ways out of delicate situations so it’s easier to blame an “overabundant” species for declines in fish stocks than it is to fault their own environmental inaction and support of rampant development  and overfishing, generating greater and greater challenges to wild fish populations.

·        Conservationists and environmentalists attempt to manage cormorant and other wildlife populations to ideal numbers determined by a jumble of input information from all the other stakeholders, sometimes reflecting economic interests over true conservation goals.

So the terms “scarce,” “abundant,” and “overabundant” reflect how individuals and groups of like-minded individuals see species populations, and their fluctuations, such as in the case of the double-crested cormorant, as positive or negative trends.

Another bird species, the snow goose, is also coming under increased pressure due to its overabundance, its phenomenal population growth rate created by management practices that failed to acknowledge and react to changing environmental and agricultural conditions until it was too late. Like the cormorant they can't seem to kill enough of them. I’ll look at this in my next blog.

To respond or comment click "comments" below or contact Dennis Wild at denniswild@earthlink.net.