Every year 100 million sharks are killed by people just for their fins -- an ingredient required for the famous shark fin soup popular in Chinese culture. In contrast, no more than 12 people a year are killed by sharks worldwide.
The possession and sale of shark fins has sparked debate throughout California. 85% of the shark fin trades in the United States are in California.
The ban has brought up many ecological, cultural, and economic issues: how does this affect the Chinese culture? What are the economic consequences of continuing shark finning?
Most importantly, how will this affect the world’s oceans? If we do not do something to stop shark finning, sharks will be extinct in 10 years.
The main counter argument against this ban is that it is discriminatory to the Chinese American community.
However, this is not an issue of cultural discrimination, because as David McGuire, founder of Sea Stewards, a non profit project of the Ocean Foundation, said, “Sharks belong to all of us.”
This idea of discrimination is a poor attempt to stop this ban and has no real weight as an argument.
Members of the Chinese American community and politicians backed the ban on shark finning, including Chinese American California State Assembly member, Paul Fong.
Shark fin soup has no nutritional value for the consumer, and in fact the shark fin does not add any flavor, just texture to the soup.
People who consume shark fins are have a higher chance of developing mercury poisoning and Alzheimer's disease.
A San Francisco chef, Corey Lee, found a way to create faux shark fin for shark fin soup. He said that customers do not realize it is faux shark fin until they are told afterwards.
“This dish of the emperors is now being eaten by hundreds of millions of people,” McGuire said. Today, fisherman are focusing on the amount of money brought in by the shark fins, but that only turns out to be around $100. It is a fact that more money is brought in by tourism, around $815,000 over the period of one sharks life.
As the top predators in the ocean ecosystem, sharks play a crucial role in the stability of the ecosystem, but sadly 20 million blue sharks alone are killed every year. Shark finning affects both the biotic and abiotic factors of the ocean ecosystem. Abiotic components are non-living chemical and physical factors in the environment, like the fact that people like to eat shark fin soup and therefore fin sharks. Biotic factors are the living things that shape an ecosystem, like humans killing sharks.
If humans continue to fin sharks and leave them to die at the bottom of the ocean, we will disrupt the entire ocean ecosystem and the biodiversity of life. For example, it will change the dynamic of the trophic levels. Trophic levels show energy that is passed between different organisms which includes producers, secondary consumer, and the primary consumer. Sharks are the top predators of the ocean, but once their species is wiped out from over fishing, it will throw the energy balance and disrupt the ocean’s ecosystem. Humans have replaced sharks as the top apex predators, therefore animals that sharks eat, like seals and sea lions, will increase in population. “We’ve got a proliferation of sea lions… The system is completely out of whack,” McGuire said. The food that the seals eat will, like medium size fish that we as humans also consume, will become overfished. Then there will be an abundance of smaller animals that those fish eat, which will decrease the biodiversity of the underwater ecosystem. “We’re vacuuming up the ocean,” McGuire continued.
For the past almost 40 years, people have associated sharks with the terrifying Great White and the suspenseful score from the movie Jaws. Mike Heithaus, a marine biology professor at Florida International University in Miami, said that "The fear of being eaten is ingrained in people. If we feel like we have some control or [a] fighting chance, a situation isn't as scary. With sharks there are no trees to climb, and you can't outswim a shark." The film spurred a frenzy of shark hunts. "There was a collective testosterone rush that went though the U.S. in the years following Jaws, where guys just wanted to catch these sharks so they could have their pictures taken with their foot on the head of a man-eater and the jaws later displayed on their mantle," said George Burgess, a shark biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. This led to a dramatic decrease in shark populations. People perceived sharks as man-eating machines, and felt no remorse for killing them. In reality, sharks do not follow and attack specific people. In fact, they rarely attack people at all - in U.S. coastal areas, people are about a hundred times more likely to be struck and killed by lightning than killed by a shark. Despite these facts, and because of Jaws, sharks are killed every day.
The urgency of this issue cannot be pressed enough. Each day 200,000 sharks are killed for their fins and tossed back into the ocean, where they sink to the bottom and die.
If we don’t do something about shark finning sharks will be extinct in 10 years. “You don’t have to love sharks, but you have to love something,” McGuire said. What will you fight for?
