Certified Shark Fins - redux!

The Shark fin trade - unsustainable and unmonitored

David's post keeps on giving!

Check out the comment by KT Tan at the end of the comments thread.
I'm being told that KT is a well known troll in the Asian press, and I should really not be feeding him - but his comments echo those by Carlie Lim of the HK Shark fin traders' association, and even those by the infamous Giam of CITES. It's crafty stuff that latches on to the bullshit propagated by what Sam calls verbose, passionate, on-line activists, and it cleverly mixes fact & fiction to weave a narrative of western imperialism and disrespect of Chinese culture.
Are we just gonna let it stand?

But worry not - I'm not gonna be suckered into feeding the troll.
Yes of course he is right about the bloody unhelpful generalization and hyperbole by the sharktivist fringe - but then comes a whole list of disinformation and rhetoric that has been brilliantly addressed and thoroughly debunked by Shark Savers here and here, so I really need not rack my brain for further clever rebuttals.

Where I want to go with this post is somewhere else.
Tan states the following

Ultimately, the moral/ethical question that arises is this : Should we eat shark’s fin soup at all?
My answer is that we should not if sharks are an endangered species, just like we do not eat whales, dolphins, tigers, elephants. bears, white sturgeons, snow leopard or panda bears etc.

Yup, and apart from not eating them, we should also not bloody buy products resulting from the poaching of endangered Tigers, Rhino, Bears and Elephants - right?

And since we're at it.
What about the bile of tortured Bears, or the meat of tortured or inhumanely killed cattle; or blood diamonds and gold that finance civil wars and genocide - and this irrespective of whether they were "legally" obtained from some murderous dictator or his militia! Or cocoa (= chocolate) and garments produced by child labor or in sweat shops - and this irrespective of whether child labor and sweat shops are being tolerated in the country of provenience! Or coffee and bananas where the growers are not getting a fair price - and this irrespective of whether the middlemen have purchased them legally! Or the products of the drug cartels - and the list goes on and on and on!
See where this is leading?

So what about those fins.
Yes the 500-odd Sharks are not all endangered - but it just so happens that the majority of the species whose fins are being traded are!
And let there also be no doubt that the only legitimate organization that assesses whether a Shark is threatened is the IUCN!
Certainly not CITES that is a politically and economically driven trade organization where several predominantly Asian countries have successfully prevented the listing of Sharks, this by "convincing" a minority to block the vote of a majority, very much like many predominantly Asian countries are undermining the decision making process within the RFMOs and using development aid to then go and reap and pillage in distant countries!

The facts are crystal clear.
Most Shark fisheries are being badly managed or not managed at all, and whereas it is correct to demand that the relevant countries must enact better management measures, it is never-the less equally correct to state that as long as they don't, one should not buy those fins. The same applies to fins that have been poached, or that have been traded through criminal cartels, or purchased from greedy middle men who cheat the fishermen - those fins should even be declared to be illegal. And the same definitely applies to fins that come from Sharks that have been cruelly finned, and from Sharks that are endangered!
That's got nothing to do with cultural discrimination - those are just the perfectly ordinary and increasingly stringent ethical guidelines of any trade, see the examples above!

And yet, the Shark fin trade remains completely non-transparent and unmonitored - to the point that one can easily purchase fins of GWs, and that shops and restaurants proudly display fins of Whale Sharks that have been obviously poached and traded in contravention of CITES Appendix II!
As long as that is the case, that trade needs to be boycotted - and where necessary, especially when there are criminal elements in play, it is perfectly legitimate that the authorities intervene with legislative bans!

Any good news for the traders?
Yes: there exist well managed and perfectly legal Shark fisheries!
I see no reason whatsoever why the fins from those legal and sometimes even reputable food fisheries for Dogfish, Thresher, Mako or the Sharks that aliment the appetite for flake should not be used for that soup!
Have those fins certified, document their provenience, brand them as sustainable and you may even succeed in selling them at a premium, much like, say, pole-caught Skipjack!

So here's the deal.
Prove that you're not exploiting poor fishermen or developing nations that don't have the means to properly manage Sharks and/or enforce their own laws; prove that you're not encouraging poaching and retention of live bycatch, and that you are not buying your products from criminal cartels; prove that you're not profiting from cruel, wasteful and unsustainable fishing practices!

That's the only way you will survive as an industry.
And if so, godspeed - and to your customers, as long as they really want to eat that stuff: bon appetit and enjoy your freedom of choice, individual predilections and cultural traditions!

And if not, face the consequences: the boycotts, the bans and the criminal prosecution.
The choice is yours.

Mary? :)

Tuna Wars in the Pacific!

Southern Bluefin - now revealed as being Critically Endangered!

I still don't quite know what happened at the WCPFC meeting.
Probably nothing to be too happy about, if this wail by Greenpeace is anything to go by.

But then again, that's just what Greenpeace do.
They have decided to take on the Tuna industry, have published at least one rather good overview and post a lot of videos, of which the following is a more moderate example whereas this one is an unmitigated messaging disaster.



The industry is not taking it laying down.
It has countered with it's own anti-Greenpeace website and with polished videos like this one.



Personally, I find all of this rather unbecoming and little goal oriented.
If one remained rational, both sides should be able to cooperate as they should be striving for the same outcome, i.e. long term sustainability. But such is the nature of those fights: fishermen over-fish and NGOs over-dramatize and I'll certainly leave it at that.

Luckily, we don't have to care all too much.
Ultimately, neither Greenpeace nor the for Tuna fishing industry have any say in this - those who take the decisions are the members of the WCPFC.
But here is the bad news: the membership is not being limited to the owners of the resource, i.e. the countries within the boundaries of the area covered by the convention but has instead been extended to the notorious resource pillagers like Europe (=Spain!!!), the US, Japan, Taiwan and China. Can somebody please explain why those countries are being allowed to arrogate themselves the right to decide about the resources that do not belong to them? Is that the dark side of development aid?
The bad news is also, that this particular convention (Art.20) mandates decisions by consensus or failing that, by a complicated 3/4 majority, meaning that positive change is painfully hard to come by and can always be blocked by one of those countries that are not members of the Pacific Islands Forum.
The good news? The member states are free to legislate further-reaching measures within their territories, and the PNA have done just that, and this very much in favor of sustainability, and are now calling the big fishing nations to task, as do the more forward thinking and pragmatic NGOs - alas probably in vain.

Long story short?
As always, it is terribly complicated and I'm sure that I'm missing the finer points. Where I am coming from in this particular debate is that I certainly advocate preserving the Pacific's vibrant and profitable commercial fishing industry as a vital contribution to the islands' economies, this however strictly under the following guidelines.

• the absolute need to focus on sustainability in order to preserve the industry for generations to come - and by this, I mean sustainability in the widest possible sense, very much taking into consideration issues like bycatch and other more general impacts on the ecosystem, etc
  
• the absolute requirement to apply the precautionary approach (Article 6) whenever there is a debate
• and like I said before, I believe that it is high time that the burden of proof be changed so that it would be the comparatively wealthy fishing industry having to invest the resources into science and monitoring and prove that what they do is sustainable, and not the cash-strapped authorities having to prove that it is not.
• And if I really, really had it my way: I would tell those foreign fleets to just fuck off and those countries, to buy their Tuna from the Pacific Islands who own them!
  

But most urgently, those destructive practices must go.
The FADs are an ecological disaster, and I strongly invite you to read David's posts here and here and educate yourselves about just how bad they are. Seriously, read them: talk about an emotional initiative by the Dolphin geeks gone horribly wrong! And the long lining industry could do much better by finally adopting the various options for bycatch mitigation as e.g. mandated by the MSC - and incidentally, catch more Tuna in the process!

And to end this on a positive note.
This is completely bycatch-free, stunningly filmed by my pal Richard Wollocombe.
Enjoy!



PS interesting article shedding some light on the negotiations here!
PS2 Pew synopsis, finally, here!
PS3 Tuna fishing ban lifted - remember?

What everybody needs to know

I stand corrected.

I was intuitively of the opinion that oceanic Sharks are most likely doomed for extinction, a hypothesis that reverberates in some of my posts like this one.
I was obviously influenced by the fact that I live in the South Pacific where fishing for coastal Sharks, compared to the killing of Sharks by the Tuna fleets, appears to be a relatively minor threat. But CJA Bradshaw is of course right when he says that globally, the threats to coastal species are higher as they don't only have to contend with fishing pressure, but with habitat degradation and climate change on top of that, likely most of it anthropogenic (the latter being a comment by me, not him).

The relevant paper he has co-authored is called Susceptibility of Sharks, Rays and Chimaeras to Global Extinction and I invite anybody who wants to talk about Shark conservation with any degree of authority to download it here. Yes you will have to pay for it - but it's a must-read and must-have and the authors need to be compensated for their hard work.

Please, take the time to read it in its entirety.
But for those in a hurry, here's a synopsis on Bradshaw's own excellent conservation blog. The authors have also published the following FOC abstract (highlights in italic are mine).

Abstract Marine biodiversity worldwide is under increasing threat, primarily as a result of over-harvesting, pollution and climate change.
Chondrichthyan fishes (sharks, rays and chimaeras) have a perceived higher intrinsic risk of extinction compared to other fish. Direct fishing mortality has driven many declines, even though some smaller fisheries persist without associated declines. Mixed-species fisheries are of particular concern, as is illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The lack of specific management and reporting mechanisms for the latter means that many chondrichthyans might already be susceptible to extinction from stochastic processes entirely unrelated to fishing pressure itself.

Chondrichthyans might also suffer relatively more than other marine taxa from the effects of fishing and habitat loss and degradation given coastal habitat use for specific life stages.
The effects of invasive species and pollution are as yet too poorly understood to predict their long-term role in affecting chondrichthyan population sizes. The spatial distribution of threatened chondrichthyan species under World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List criteria are clustered mainly in (1) south-eastern South America; (2) western Europe and the Mediterranean; (3) western Africa; (4) South China Sea and Southeast Asia and (5) south-eastern Australia. To determine which ecological and life history traits predispose chondrichthyans to being IUCN Red-Listed, and to examine the role of particular human activities in exacerbating threat risk, we correlated extant marine species' Red List categorisation with available ecological (habitat type, temperature preference), life history (body length, range size) and human-relationship (whether commercially or game-fished, considered dangerous to humans) variables. Threat risk correlations were constructed using generalised linear mixed-effect models to account for phylogenetic relatedness. We also contrasted results for chondrichthyans to marine teleosts to test explicitly whether the former group is intrinsically more susceptible to extinction than fishes in general. Around 52% of chondrichthyans have been Red-Listed compared to only 8% of all marine teleosts; however, listed teleosts were in general placed more frequently into the higher-risk categories relative to chondrichthyans. IUCN threat risk in both taxa was positively correlated with body size and negatively correlated albeit weakly, with geographic range size. Even after accounting for the positive influence of size, Red-Listed teleosts were still more likely than chondrichthyans to be classified as threatened.

We suggest that while sharks might not have necessarily experienced the same magnitude of deterministic decline as Red-Listed teleosts, their larger size and lower fecundity (not included in the analysis) predispose chondrichthyans to a higher risk of extinction overall.

Removal of these large predators can elicit trophic cascades and destabilise the relative abundance of smaller species.
Predator depletions can lead to permanent shifts in marine communities and alternate equilibrium states. Climate change might influence the phenology and physiology of some species, with the most probable response being changes in the timing of migrations and shifts in distribution.

The synergistic effects among harvesting, habitat changes and climate-induced forcings are greatest for coastal chondrichthyans with specific habitat requirements and these are currently the most likely candidates for extinction.
Management of shark populations must take into account the rate at which drivers of decline affect specific species. Only through the detailed collection of data describing demographic rates, habitat affinities, trophic linkages and geographic ranges, and how environmental stressors modify these, can extinction risk be more precisely estimated and reduced. The estimation of minimum viable population sizes, below which rapid extinction is more likely due to stochastic processes, is an important component of this endeavour and should accompany many of the current approaches used in shark management worldwide.

I find this paper so important that I've taken the liberty of posting its conclusions below.
They tie in beautifully with some of this blog's principal threads, among which the requirement to push for sustainable fisheries. What I however miss is the call for applying the precautionary principle (much called for and rarely heeded, especially in Fisheries management) until the necessary data have been collected and evaluated - but then again, this is a paper dealing with facts and not a conservation manifesto.

Required reading and kudos to the authors for having written an excellent, informative, exhaustive and in so may ways, seminal paper for Shark conservation!

7. Concluding Remarks

We are still in the fortunate situation that there are no recorded cases of chondrichthyan extinction in modern times.
However, we have identified that the largest, most range-restricted and heavily harvested species might be easily pushed below their MVP sizes, which could be much larger than those estimated under stable environmental conditions. Fishing, at all scales, represents one of the largest mortality sources for many chondrichthyan species, but there are some examples of small local fisheries that have operated without clear declines in population size of targeted species. However, mixed-species fisheries that harvest poorly measured, but presumably large quantities of chondrichthyans are of particular concern, as is IUU fishing.

The lack of specific management and reporting mechanisms for the latter types means that many species might already be reduced to densities where extinction risk is unacceptably high.
It is almost universally recognised now that so-called ‘sustainable’ fisheries will have to be the norm if they are to survive economically, and that they will have to demonstrate negligible or minimal impacts to ecosystems through careful management and stewardship (Hilborn, 2007). IUU fishing can affect shark populations and community structure, and this might be a far greater challenge to control. Recreational fishing and beach meshing can also contribute to local declines. Climate change and habitat degradation will further erode certain populations to the point where extinction risk rises appreciably.

The idea that chondrichthyans have life history characteristics that might predispose them to extinction in a rapidly changing world (e.g. relatively low reproductive potential, growth and capacity for population recovery; Pratt and Casey, 1990) is generally upheld by our results. Furthermore, because chondrichthyans tend to occupy the highest trophic levels, it is arguable that degradation of marine communities might limit the prey quality and quantity available to chondrichthyan predators, further exacerbating population reductions. We found no strong evidence, from admittedly simple models with few parameters, that chondrichthyans are intrinsically more susceptible to extinction than other marine fishes in relation to their evolved niches and life history characteristics. However, chondrichthyans tend to be larger than many other marine fish taxa, and large body size generally correlates with slower growth and lower reproductive capacity. As such, it is the rapid pace of environmental change and harvesting that have the greatest potential to impede certain species from maintaining large population sizes. Any species can withstand moderate to even extreme exploitation if it does not outpace intrinsic replacement rates and adaptation potential (Brook et al., 2008).

We were unable to examine all plausible correlates of threat risk due to data paucity.
Many studies have examined age at maturity and growth rates in terms of vulnerability to extinction, with late-maturing and slow-growing species apparently at greater risk (Reynolds et al., 2005). Therefore, a better compilation of data incorporating these and other possible correlates could reveal further subtleties in the drivers of threat risk in this taxon and other marine fishes. Another caveat is that predictors of threat risk indicate a species’ sensitivity to the largely systematic (deterministic) drivers of population decline (declining population paradigm) (Cardillo, 2003; Sodhi et al., 2008a), whereas actual extinction appears to correlate poorly with ecological and life history traits given that the final coup de grâce tends to result from largely stochastic processes that act independently of a species’ evolutionary history (Brook et al., 2006, 2008; Sodhi et al., 2008b; Traill et al., 2007)

There are many examples of how large predators influence communities and ecosystems via top-down (and in some cases, bottom-up) control of species occupying lower trophic levels.
Thus, the removal of large predators can elicit trophic cascades and destabilise the relative abundance of smaller prey and non-prey species. However, these effects are still poorly understood, especially for large, complex trophic webs where interactions are largely unquantified. Specifically, chondrichthyans can alter prey diversity and size distributions, and their mere presence can affect the foraging behaviour of prey that alters ecosystem functions such as nutrient recycling and structural habitat complexity.

Severe predator depletions can lead to permanent shifts in marine communities and alternate equilibria.
Management of shark populations must therefore take into account the rate at which drivers of decline affect specific species. Only through detailed collection of data describing demographic rates, habitat affinities, trophic linkages and geographic ranges, and how environmental stressors modify these, can extinction risk be estimated and reduced. The estimation of MVP sizes is an essential component of this endeavour and should, in our view, eventually accompany the current approaches used to manage sharks worldwide.

Global Warming - Dogma? Religion? Conspiracy?

I really thought that Anthropogenic Climate Change was a foregone conclusion.

I thought that the polar caps and the alpine glaciers were melting. That Ocean Acidification was a major threat and well-supported by unequivocal data. That Oz was in dire straights.
Granted, the Academy Awards may be just the self-masturbation celebration of the Californian liberal intelligentsya. But the Nobel Price should account for something and confer both legitimacy and scientific gravitas - or not?

No, apparently not.
Watch this.

Clearly, the guy is no fool. He may even have a point.
If so, it would indeed be highly alarming. One of the principal differences between Science and Religion is that Science should never be dogmatic and always welcome a robust dialogue with dissenters - mind you, scientific dissenters using scientific data and methods, not fraudsters like the proponents of Intelligent Design!

The guy is Ian Plimer and he has just written a book called Heaven and Earth.
Although most people haven't read it as is just being published, it is already causing quite a debate following this op-ed by a prominent Ozzie journo. Another good piece here.

Being scientifically minded, I will of course read it.
Probably, I'll be impressed - but I shall probably not be swayed.

It's a difficult one.
The very nature of Science implies that there will always be intelligent, well-meaning and well-documented dissenters. Non-specialists like most of us are then left with the conundrum of whom to believe.

For my part, I try to follow the debate and if sufficiently convinced, I tend to go with what is considered to be the "consensus opinion".
When it comes to Global Warming, the consensus opinion is represented by the Nobel Prize Laureates, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and many other reputable Organizations. They believe that Global Warming is a fact and that it is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, foremost of which our emissions of CO2.

If one dismisses the obvious disinformation campaigns and the rubbish of the inevitable conspiracy theorists, there is still a large group of bona fide -and thus, respectable- scientists who are looking into the issue. They can be divided into a majority of proponents and a minority of skeptics, the latter being divided into several factions, from people that deny that there is any warming at all, to people who accept that it is happening but claim that it is not caused by humans.
As I said, it's really a difficult one - check out the links!

But regardless of who will be ultimately proven right, this is why I'm likely to stick to the Global Warming hypothesis.

Let's assume for the sake of the argument that Global Warming turns out to be nothing but a hoax, a mass hysteria triggered by the propaganda of the Socialists and the Liberals, a scam perpetrated by the scientific mafia in order to get more funding: does that mean that we should throw overboard our newly discovered Ecological conscience?
Reverse Cap & Trade? Shelve Solar and Wind and drill more instead? Go ahead and cut down more forests? Tell Detroit to resume the production of SUVs? Reap and pillage like we've always done? Continue the unbridled expansion of our collective Ecological Footprint at the expense of the Environment? Further add to the disgraceful track record of our Stewardship of Planet Earth?

Surely, the answer can only be, No we should not!
Hoax or no Hoax, Truth or Fallacy: the actual debate about Global Warming is offering us a unique chance to re-assess our way of life and to revert, or at least halt the negative impact we're having on the Environment.
Can any Conservation-minded person really be against that?

And then, there's this.

Can we really afford to take the risk of being wrong?
Do we really have the option of disregarding the warnings, do nothing and continue as before? Only to say Oops once the doomsday prophecies turn out to be true and we are faced with the Apocalypse?
I've blogged about just this in respect to the Fisheries industry. The Precautionary Principle dictates that when presented by plausible theories like the present one, one has to assume the worst case scenario, stop procrastinating and act accordingly. Once the required data have been collected and once a solid scientific consensus is established (although I would argue that this is already the case), one can then always reverse course and relax the measures.
Principle #15 of the Rio Declaration states just that.

Yes, that's a lot of debate and a lot of links to sift through!
Yet, I believe, nothing could be more important.
Further arguments here.