2. One Fish. Two Fish. Red Fish… No Fish.

3. Snow Caps Cones for Everyone.

4. Too Many Lionfish on the Dance Floor.

5. I See Deadzones.

6. No Escape from Plastic Monstas.

7. Where Have All the Coral Reefs Gone and Where are all the Cod?

8. Goodness Gracious, Great Plumes of Oil…and Mercury…and all that other crap we put in the sea.

9. I’m all alone and there’s no zooxanthellae inside me.

10. Fin.

The post 10 Reasons Why the Ocean’s Struggle is Real first appeared on Deep Sea News.

While the images, collected between 2010 and Dec 2013, clearly show one or more whale sharks being butchered, WildLifeRisk also submitted samples of “shark oil” to the lab of Mahmood Shivji at Nova Southeastern University’s Guy Harvey Research Institute for DNA based identification.  The team there confirmed the presence of white shark and basking shark in the samples, but “inconclusive” for the whale shark.  I called up Mahmood to ask him what that meant and he clarified that the sequence was consistent with whale shark for the supposed whale shark sample, but that the data quality wasn’t good enough to make a unequivocal ID, possibly due to the processes involved in rendering the liver down to an oil.  You hardly need a confirmed DNA ID in my opinion, since no other shark has the size and spotted pattern evident from the photos.

Perhaps most damning of all, the report links to a Vimeo video apparently taken in covert fashion, wherein the proprietor of the facility and his brother describe how much whale shark, blue shark, and basking shark oil they produce in a year, where they send it and what they do with the skins.  He also admits to relabeling the oil and smuggling the material overseas (specifically to Chinese restaurants and grocers in Europe), presumably to get around the CITES restrictions.  He also describes receiving substantial numbers of whale sharks from Taiwan, where they have been protected for several years.

China Whale Sharks from WildLifeRisk on Vimeo.

This is one of the more appalling instances of shark exploitation that I know of, and I can’t help but be particularly appalled about the inclusion of whale sharks.  As the WildLifeRisk folks point out in their release, sharks can be worth way more alive as part of the ecotourism trade than they are dead and rendered down to a bottle of oil.  But putting all that aside, whale sharks and basking sharks are magnificent, peaceful, filter feeding giants, and white sharks are an awesome and misunderstood predator.  All of them are among the most spectacular animals on the planet and they deserve and need our protection, especially in light of the recent IUCN report stating that a quarter of all shark and ray species are at risk of extinction.  They all have low reproductive potential, which means that they are not very resilient in the face of the kind of harvest shown in this report.  This isn’t a problem restricted to China, either; the whale sharks from the South China Sea may travel through the Indian and Pacific oceans, including many other countries that feature whale shark ecotourism.  So, while this specific factory is on Chinese soil, this is most definitely the world’s problem and many nations have a stake.

What can we do to help remedy this sort of situation?  I see three things.  One comes in the form of this very important exposé from WildLifeRisk: we need to recognise and define the problem.  Second, we need to enforce existing regulations that are designed to prevent this sort of tragedy. Third, we need to educate consumers so that the market forces that motivate these business practices cease to be.  WildAid has had great success with their campaign “When the buying stops, the killing can too”, where they have recruited serious star power in the form of basketball star Yao Ming and others, to reduce the market for shark fin soup in Chinese traditional cuisine.  Sometimes it’s as simple as getting people to realise “what’s in the bowl”. The story goes that the Chinese name for shark fin soup is “fish wing soup”, and many who consumed it had no idea from where it came.  Once alerted, they stopped eating it.  WildAid reports a significant success on the fin soup front, including a drop in shark fin soup consumption rates and the removal of the product from official government events.  It seems that a fairly simple extension of the successful approach of WildAid might help to reduce the motivations for the sort of unconscionable slaughter revealed by WildLifeRisk.  Perhaps you can spread the news to everyone you know and ask that they do the same, so that we might not need to see these sorts of disturbing images again.  Who knows, maybe some of our Chinese readers can help spread the word, too, because I for one prefer this:

To this:

 Are you in China and reading this?  If so, we’d love to hear from you.  Please chime in in the comments section with your perspectives, we value your feedback.

EDIT: I have had some queries about CITES – the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species –  so here’s my best understanding of what it means and why it is important in this case.  The three species here (white, whale and basking) are all CITES Appendix II listed, which means that fishing states would have to demonstrate that any exports were derived from a sustainably-managed population and to allow exports and imports to be monitored by a third party.  This effectively extinguishes most markets because the “sustainably managed population” criterion is an near impossible burden of proof when it comes to listed species, which are typically listed in the first place because they are vulnerable to or threatened with extinction.  Moreover, CITES listed products cannot be monitored effectively when mixed with other species and smuggled, as admitted in the video.  I think we can safely assume that “smuggle” in this case means that they didn’t have a CITES export permit from the Chinese government, which is a signatory to the CITES treaty.  I’ve done CITES export permitting for scientific samples from whale sharks, although not from China, and it was neither simple nor straightforward.

The post Whale shark slaughterhouse exposed in China first appeared on Deep Sea News.

While it seems his heart is in the right place (“Any effective measures that protect our valuable ocean resources … will get my vote”) the article is based on some terribly ill-informed and nonsensical arguments.  The statement “Many commercial fishing vessels will, as normal practice, retain the entire shark body as it has many uses.” shows ignorance of the problem, which is that the fins are so much more valuable than the rest of the carcass that this is precisely NOT what the offending vessels do.  If the boat can carry two tons in the hold, then 2 tons of fins is worth way more to the fisher than 2 tons of whole sharks; that’s the whole reason finning exists in the first place!

He asks if it is equitable to ban shark fin soup and instead “Shouldn’t we go after those unscrupulous operators who engage in illegal activities to chase fast profits?” Yes, and finning is already illegal in Canada, but it is not enough.  If  the soup is the whole reason finning occurs and you take away the market, then there ceases to be motivation for the undesired practice.  The bigger question we should really be asking is “Is the cultural practice of eating  this one flavour of soup worth destroying a whole class of vertebrates for, or can we encourage cultural practices to evolve to a more harmonious balance with nature?“.  If the answer is no, or the argument is taking too long, then it becomes necessary to stop it through legislative measures before it’s too late, which is how proposals to ban shark fin soup or possession of fins arise.

Mr Mo argues that it’s inequitable to ban finning if we don’t ban bluefin tuna fishing as well.  Well, yeah, we probably should do that too, since bluefin have been decimated by overfishing and are commercially extinct in some places and headed that way in others.  He is right that bluefin are incredibly valuable, it’s called EXTINCTION ECONOMICS, and the same will happen to sharks as we fish them down to zero too, if we’re not careful.  The fins are already vastly more valuable than they were.

His final argument that shark fin consumption in the US and Canada is insignificant next to that in Asia, so banning it in Nth America will not help is, frankly, absurd.  Obviously, every shark saved is a win!  Just because there are worse offenders doesn’t mean we should keep on with a culinary practice that encourages a despicable and repugnant fishing activity.  John Wayne Gacy killed more folks than Dahmer but it doesn’t mean Dahmer’s kills were any less significant; except for the top spot, there’s always a bigger fish, so that is no kind of argument.  When it comes to fomenting cultural change, you can only change what you have influence over, so you start at home where change is most feasible, and then you lobby other nations to change their practices until you create a global movement.  I suspect, and am not afraid to hope, that the practice of eating shark fin soup and the awful fishing method it has spawned are on the way out, and like most slow revolutions it will take place inexorably, one fin at a time, everywhere.

If you want to know more about finning and the shark fin soup controversy, Southern Fried Science has covered it extensively

The post Shark finning: a response to Kim Bosco Mo first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Thankfully, public awareness of finning is on the rise and the practice has come under intense pressure of late.  Some have argued that this pressure represents a form of cultural discrimination against Chinese or Chinese Americans.  For the people who feel that way,  I dig deep down into my sympathy bag and come up with not. very. much.  Get over yourselves.  It’s not about you, it’s about the sharks.  We kill hundreds of millions of them per year and their populations globally are in serious decline.  Are you telling me you can’t give up a bowl of soup to save one of nature’s greatest creations?  Please.  You know what?  If we keep finning, then one day we’ll fin the last shark and eat the last bowl of soup and then where will we be?  In exactly the same position, only now we’ll know that the reason we can’t eat shark fin soup anymore is our own fault.  I’d love to think that we could develop shark fisheries that are sustainable over the long term, but their biology largely precludes that; they grow too slowly and are too slow to mature, and this particular market is for such a tiny part of the animal.  Face facts, one way or another, shark fin soup is doomed, it’s just a question of whether it takes all the sharks with it.  I would think it the mark of an advanced society that we can choose to forgo something we personally enjoy and find culturally significant, in order to conserve a whole class of animals for all cultures, not to mention for this and future generations.  Traditions are important, but cultures are also dynamic and this is one situation where we really need to make a change.

Enter Max Guinn, a 5th grade student from San Diego.  Max is an enterprising young man.  He co-founded a group called KidsEcoClub as “a place where kids and the environment meet” and has started a petition, addressed to President Obama no less, pleading for a legislative ban on shark finning.  Now, the US already has legislation on the books that is aimed at minimising finning: the Shark Conservation Act that Pres. Obama passed in December 2010.  It requires that sharks be landed with their fins on or that the weight of fins on a fishing vessel be matched by a proportional weight of shark carcases (in other words, you cant have more fins than sharks).  Max wants a tougher stance, however.  He’s asking to make it illegal for people to possess, sell, trade or distribute shark fins.  Six states (and several other countries) have proactively enacted these kinds of bans, but Max wants it to be federal law and he needs your help to do it.  Please consider signing his petition and distributing this link to others.  By taking action now we can all help save shark lives, preserve a semblance of balance in the oceans and reward the activism of young people who are living up to the doctrine “be the change you want to see in the world”.  Do it now, it will only take a minute.

The post A San Diego 5th grader is trying to end shark finning, will you help? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Causal relationships can be fiendishly tricky. Spend an hour watching any of Star Trek Voyager’s time travel episodes and you begin to understand why the show’s writers often resort to lines such as, “It’s better if we don’t talk about this too much.” Consider another example of causality. I’m hammering-out this post at home with a real doozy of a head cold. My sinuses are completely congested. I can feel a chest full of gunk as I breathe. And my body generally feels achy and sore. Retracing my steps, I might place contraction from surface contact or airborne transmission at work where one of my officemates was complaining last week of “a cold.” Or it may have been aboard the overheated, moist Petri dish of my commuter ferry. Or maybe it was from the plates, silverware, water, or food from any of the restaurants I visited last week.

Not having the Center for Disease Control’s Epidemic Intelligence Service activated at every case of the common cold, I will likely never know the ultimate cause of my dreary, mucus-filled weekend. But I can connect enough dots, enough small actions, to construct a few compelling transmission scenarios that might hold water. The more dots I connect, however, the more provisional and potentially implausible my scenarios might become. Causally, they may seem tenable. But at some point, the casual relationships become so tenuously hair-thin that it simply strains credibility.

In his 1758 Poor Richard’s Almanac, Benjamin Franklin captured the causal notion that small actions can result in large consequences through the proverb, For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail. But Franklin’s verse was a further contraction of yet more causal links in an earlier version of the proverb,

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

As I’ve written about before, the practice of marine conservation is full of deciphering causal relationships and complex dependencies. When environmental problems strike, a natural response is to point to the cause. Sometimes that’s easy. A ship grounding scar on a coral reef is essentially the marine equivalent of a ballistics crime scene investigation. You trace a spent shell or gunshot damage back to a specific firearm, and then you search for gun owners with motive, means, and opportunity. But more often, like my head cold, it’s a very complex process to identify causal relationships. In marine ecosystems, it’s often incredibly complicated. In part because it’s an open system with many inputs. But it’s also because we still don’t fully understand how marine ecosystems operate.

So the challenge for constructing meaningful conservation interventions is to untie the often messy causal knots in order to get to the root of the problem. And recently, marine conservation knots don’t seem to get much messier than shark conservation.

Before we get into the messiness, let’s start with what we know:

• In general, sharks grow slowly, mature late and produce few young over long lifetimes, leaving them exceptionally vulnerable to overexploitation and slow to recover from depletion.
• The onset of industrial fishing over the past 60 years has drastically depleted global shark populations. Of the shark and ray species assessed by scientists for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 30 percent are threatened or near-threatened with extinction.
• Shark finning–the practice of catching a shark, slicing off its fins and then discarding the body at sea–takes a tremendous toll on shark populations. Finning primarily supports the global shark fin industry, valued for the Asian delicacy shark fin soup.

So far, not much handwringing needed to provide answers. Where we start to get into the weeds however is when we ask a basic question such as, “How many sharks are there in the oceans?” Washington Post journalist and author Juliet Eilperin did a good job of capturing this uncertainty in her recent book, Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks. Scientists at the IUCN gave her an estimate as high as five-billion individuals. When asking Dalhousie University fisheries biologist Boris Worm, who spends his time trying to quantify how many fish are actually still swimming in the oceans, she got a more nuanced (but still vague) answer,

“There are nearly seven billion people on earth right now, right? There are five-hundred species of sharks, so in order to have more sharks than people, you’d have to have ten to twenty million per population. That seems like a lot. My guess would be there are more people than sharks in the world, but it’s hard to say because there are some shark populations we don’t know anything about, like deepwater sharks.”

Eilperin’s conclusion? There is no precise way at this moment to calculate whether shark populations outnumber human populations, or vice versa. It will take research for years to come.

More important to shark conservationists at the moment is the question of how many sharks are killed annually for the global fin trade. As with estimating global shark populations, estimating annual kill rates is also nebulous. Some online shark conservation petitions have claimed harvest rates at 100 million to over 200 million (all using somewhat fuzzy math). The Pew Global Shark Conservation group uses the statistic that “up to 73 million sharks are killed every year…” based on Shelley Clarke’s estimate of 26 to 73 million sharks killed each year. Admittedly, that’s quite a range! But even if we assume the annual harvest was at the low end (23 million sharks killed annually) or the median (38 million sharks killed annually), that’s a tremendously high harvest rate for an already depleted species that matures late and produce few young over long lifetimes.

I won’t spend more time rehashing what other writers have already done a great job in summarizing. The fact is we simply do not know exact numbers involved in the global shark trade. Absent that ability to know for certain, a precautionary approach of promoting shark protections wherever possible seems warranted. Besides, the intention of this piece is not to argue quantitative methods. It’s to discuss how the shark conservation community argues causal relationships from those numbers.

Currently, I’m engaged in three separate shark conservation efforts in my coral reef conservation work around the world. Why is a coral reef conservationist focusing on a single species? Good question (and one my board of directors has asked on numerous occasions). My rationale has been based on causal relationships that affect ecosystem health and national economics.

The ecological argument: Coral reef shark species are often apex or top predators, helping to regulate species abundance and diversity while maintaining balance throughout an ecosystem. Studies have shown that coral reef ecosystems with high numbers of apex predators tend to have greater biodiversity and higher densities of individual species.

The loss of apex predators in a reef ecosystem upsets the natural food web and changes the composition of the reef community, eventually leading to the decline of critical reef species like herbivorous fish. With fewer herbivores, algae can become overgrown, suffocating the reef and reducing the number of available niches for fish species.

The economic argument: In addition to being important for overall ecosystem health, sharks are also valuable to the tourism industry and to the economic health of coral reef tourism destinations. A recent report from the Australian Institute of Marine Science found that shark tourism accounts for approximately eight percent of the G.D.P of the island nation of Palau. The study showed that the roughly one hundred sharks inhabiting the most popular dive sites in the area were each worth $179,000 annually to the local tourism industry, giving each shark an approximate lifetime value of $1.9 million. A similar report is soon to be released for the Nation of Fiji.

Is it good strategy to hitch ecosystem conservation to a series of causal relationships (essentially “what if” statements) that boils down to the premise that removing sharks threatens the ecology and economies of coral reef nations? Time will tell. And critics of the shark/coral reef cascade-effect research, such as my colleague Pete Mumby, have not been shy to point out that many of the studies have significant limitations and there are far more substantial (and less spurious) rationales we could leverage to protect reefs than dealing the shark card.

But last week I came across what might be the ultimate spurious causal relationship claim for shark conservation. The Global Shark Conservation Initiative Facebook page linked to the article, Haaienvinnensoep drijft haaienpopulaties wereldwijd de soep in! (Shark fin soup driving shark populations worldwide in the soup!) by Katrien Vandevelde, director secretary of a conservation organization called Sea First. I’ve had to rely on Google Translate for the Dutch to English translation of the original PDF article, so apologies in advance for any errors here.

[2/4/2012 RickMac Update: Since writing this post, Katrien Vandevelde has contacted me to acknowledge that she based her original comments made in Haaienvinnensoep drijft haaienpopulaties wereldwijd de soep in! on erroneous data.  She has taken steps to correct her statements, including adding her voice in the comments section below.]

In her first several paragraphs, Vandevelde runs through the usual shark basics… the long evolutionary lineage, humans aren’t very good shark food, how sharks might mistake humans as prey, slow growth and limited reproductive rate of sharks. Your basic “Sharks for Dummies” narrative. But then Vandevelde jumps the shark on this passage:

Het belang van haaien gaat echter nog verder dan dat. Tot 70% van de zuurstof die wij ademen wordt geproduceerd in de zee, door fytoplankton. Dit fytoplankton bestaat uit microscopische plantjes en algen en samen vormen ze de bouwstenen van het ecosysteem in de zee. De zee absorbeert ook tot 80% van de CO2 die wij uitstoten en fytoplankton zet een groot deel daarvan om in zuurstof. Zo zorgt de zee dat de opwarming van de aarde wordt getemperd en er voldoende zuurstof wordt geproduceerd. Maar een zware verstoring van het evenwicht, veroorzaakt door het wegvissen van de roofdieren in de bovenste lagen van de voedselketen, kan een exponentiële toename van kleine planktonetende visjes en diertjes tot gevolg hebben. In dat scenario is het realistisch dat onze zuurstofvoorraad in het gedrang kan komen. De zee kan de door ons uitgestoten CO2 dan ook niet meer bufferen waardoor de opwarming van de aarde en de verzuring van het zeewater door een teveel aan CO2 zich sterker zullen laten gelden.

[Imperfect translation]
The importance of sharks goes however still further then that. Up to 70% of oxygen which we breathe is produced in the sea, by phytoplankton. This phytoplankton exists in the from of microscopic plants and algae and together form the base of ecosystems in the sea. The sea also absorbs up to 80% of CO2 which we expel and the phytoplankton use to produce oxygen. This ensures that the sea is tempered and there is enough oxygen produced. But if a heavy disruption or imbalance removes carnivorous fish in the upper layers of the food chain, it is possible an exponential increase of small plankon-eating fishes and other animals to occur. In that scenario, our oxygen supply may be affected. The sea, the CO2 emitted by us is therefore not buffering so global warming and the acidification of sea water by excess CO2 will be more prominent.

Readers may recall that I’ve written before on the old “the ocean produces most of the Earth’s oxygen” trope, so I won’t spend any time on it here. But Ms Vandevelde is arguing for a causal chain that starts with sharks being depleted and ends with global warming and ocean acidification. Why not just throw the global stock market crash into the mix as well and we may really have a cascade trifecta that gets people to prick up their ears!

Consider the following: I am fat. Not just a little overweight, but fat. Probably obese by a physicians height/weight table. Now, I can start eating better, moving more, and developing some muscle at the gym. This might lead to fitting into more flattering clothes that accent my new bod. Fitting into more flattering clothes might encourage me to show off my new wardrobe and bod by sitting around in San Francisco café’s. Sitting around in San Francisco café’s looking chic and buff might attract the attention of Ricky Martin on his next swing through San Francisco. And capturing the eye of Ricky Martin might mean I could retire to Puerto Rico and not worry about coral reef and shark conservation for a while.

Or I could realize that as a fat, 48 year-old man in a fairly stressful job, I have heart disease, a few strokes, or diabetes to look forward to.

Which of the two makes a more plausible and compelling argument for losing weight?

Look, I’m not here to make another conservation professional’s life difficult.  We don’t get paid enough and we have true bad guys to fight on a daily basis.  I realize that the bad guys are not bound by any codes of ethics, honesty, or integrity in their tactics.  But if we are attempting to build long-term, environmentally-conscious constituents,  shouldn’t conservation seek a higher path?  I can only assume that Ms Vandevelde is sincere in her call for protections.  But if we are going to be taken seriously by policy shapers, the scientific community, our public, and each other, then our words and arguments matter.

The post For Want Of A Shark… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

What is more important is that he will reach an audience that many scientists have difficulty reaching to. This is the beauty in using celebrities in environmental messaging. A segment of society may actually listen to them more, even if it is subconsciously, than someone with an appropriate scientific background. The body language and words, both scripted and non, tell another story when coming from the mouth of a non-expert – otherwise an interested member of the public.

Not safe for work due to language.

The post Shark Bait: Gordon Ramsay Helps Expose Shark Finning first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Is Sea Sheppard Good or Bad for Sharks? first appeared on Deep Sea News.