Wild Ocean Blue

This week is European Shark Week run by the Shark Alliance.

The idea is to spread the word about the many species of shark, ray and chimera that live in European waters, and highlight the problems they are all facing.

The Save Our Seas Foundation is running a great blog throughout the week. Offerings over the weekend include the announcement by three major european supermarkets that they plan to stock only shark products from non-threatened species. It’s a step in the right direction, but how about not selling any sharks at all?

Shark fins without the bodies they came from. Jessica King/Marine Photobank.

Shark Week has just begun and already there is one piece of encouraging news for European sharks.

It’s been announced that shark finning will be affectively banned in the UK. The plan is to close a loophole in existing legislation by no-longer giving fishermen permits to bring back fins that have been separated from sharks at sea. Hopefully this will turn the pressure up on Spain and Portugal, the two main shark-finning nations in Europe, to do something similar.

So, do look out for more European shark news this week.

And you can spread the word a little further yourself by sending out  Shark Week e-cards to your friends (check out the theme music!).

The Pacific island nation, Palau, has announced a ban on shark fishing throughout it’s territorial waters. This bold show of commitment to curbing the global shark cull will put over half a million square km of ocean off limits to shark fishing. That’s an area slightly smaller than the whole of France.

In recent years we hear little but bad news about sharks. As experts work their way through the species, virtually every one is assigned a label of endangerment on the IUCN Red List, ranging from near threatened to critically endangered.

So is this at last some good news for sharks?

Young tiger shark (c) Terry Goss 2007/Marine Photobank

Surely yes, it is. It doesn’t matter one bit that Palau’s decision was sweetened by the prospect of tourist dollars pouring in from scuba divers desperate for shark encounters. Perhaps all the better that recognition is growing of the alternative price tag sharks carry, rather than as simply a pile of meat, cartilage and fins.

But I can’t help worrying about that enormous area of ocean we are talking about here in a region famous for it’s abundant shark populations. Does Palau have the resources to police such a vast area? How can they possibly keep out illegal fishing boats?

There’s no doubt that Palau are going to need some help if this is to be anything but a marine reserve on paper.

Other countries need to take steps to help stamp out illegal shark fishing and work out ways of cutting down the number of sharks killed unintentionally every year by long-lining and trawl fisheries.

One relatively straight-forward solution – or part of the solution – would be a world-wide ban on landing fins that are not accompanied by the sharks they grew on.

A shark thrown back without its fins. Nancy Boucha, www.scubasystems.org 2005/Marine Photobank

The greatest incentive for shark fishing these days is to sell their valuable fins into the shark fin soup trade. Forcing fishermen to give up at-sea finning could help cut down the number that of sharks are killed every year. A single boat can carry thousands of fins, but far fewer whole shark carcasses.

Pile of shark fins. Jessica King/Marine Photobank

President of Palau, Johnson Toribiong, told BBC News “…the need to protect the sharks outweighs the need to enjoy a bowl of soup.”

Absolutely it does.

Whatever happens next, Palau has made a radical and admirable step in declaring shark fishing out of bounds. It raises the bar in terms of the level of commitment we need to see all around the world if the oceans are to be anywhere near as shark-infested as they should be.