Shark Finning - BAD!!!

Sharks have always been one of my favorite animals. I love the power and grace with which they glide through the water, commanding the respect of the animals around them.

Shark finning is the act of cutting off a sharks fin to make shark fin soup, a delicacy in China. After the fisherman have cut off the fins, they drop the sharks back into the water, usually alive, but not for long. Shark finning causes about 100 million shark deaths per year. Sometimes the fins sell for as much as $500 a pound.

I'm suggesting we should stop shark finning altogether, but if, for some reason, that isn't possible, here are two ways we could maybe make things a little better:

Currently, fisherman take the shark fins back to the market and dump the dead bodies back in the water. Instead of leaving the shark to die in the ocean, they could take it back to the market too and sell it. For every 1 person that eats shark fin soup, 19 more people could be fed from the rest of the sharks body. About 95% of shark meat is wasted by finning. Especially in places like China, with a growing population of 1.37 billion people, that is a lot of food wasted.

Sharks are a HUGE source of revenue in the tourism industry. From snorkeling with whale sharks in Mexico to cage diving with great white sharks in South Africa, countries around the world use their wildlife as a source of income. In the Bahamas, sharks alone lead to $78 million in benefits PER YEAR. Shark ecotourism generates about $314 million per year globally, and that number is expected to double in the next 20 years. “One estimate for hammerhead sharks suggests that a live shark, over the course of its lifetime, is worth $1.6 million, which is a great deal higher than the $200 the dead shark can sell for” (http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-news/shark-finning-sharks-turned-prey).



Sharks are apex predators - they are the animals at the top of the food chain, and they indirectly control the ecological balance of the food web.” Sharks do not hunt specific prey, and different species live in different regions of the world, so they maintain a stable balance across all species lower on the food chain.

In the North Atlantic, black-tip sharks kept the population of the cow-nose rays in check. As the population of sharks plummeted due to shark finning, the population of cow-nose rays soared, and they began demolishing the scallop population, which almost ruined all of the fisheries in the area and nearly created a huge food shortage. Sharks are keystone species’, and without them, entire food chains could be upturned and cause global food insecurity issues.

Personally, I think one of the best things we can do to help stop shark finning is to change the narrative. Right now, sharks are seen as violent, dangerous predators that will destroy anything and everything in their path. But sharks are extremely important for ecosystems in the ocean, and most of them are actually very general. In order to start the process of changing the narrative, I have attached some fun and interesting facts about sharks below:


1. A person's chance of getting attacked by a shark is 1 in 11.5 million, and a person's chance of getting killed by a shark is less than 1 in 264.1 million.


2. Out of more than 489 shark species, only three are responsible for a double-digit number of fatal, unprovoked attacks on humans: the great white, tiger, and bull.


3. On average, there are 16 shark attacks per year in the United States, with one fatality every two years.


4. 11 animals more likely to kill you than sharks: mosquitos, hippos, deer, bees, dogs, ants, jellyfish, cows, horses, spiders, and snakes


5. THINGS more likely to kill you than sharks: highschool/college football, champagne corks, tripping, lunch, ladders, hot tap water, icicles, vending machines (37 people were killed trying to get a snack from a vending machine from 1978 to 1995), falling out of bed


I hope you found this post interesting and informative. I am extremely passionate about marine wildlife and particularly sharks, and I hope that you have maybe changed your mind about some initial thoughts you probably had about sharks.