Half a Million Sharks Finned Each Year in Ecuador : Shifting Baselines

The Shifting Baselines Blog

Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.

Scientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is also a blog contributor.

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November 2008 Jennifer Jacquet is lead author of the study In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador's waters published in Environmental Sciences.

November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.

August 2008: Jennifer Jacquet is co-author on a new paper titled Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-Scale Fisheries published in Conservation Biology.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology titled Diversity, invasive species, and extinctions in insular ecosystems.

July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.

July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.

July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.

July 19, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the West Coast at Outfest in Hollywood, CA.

July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.

July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.

May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.

May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.

April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.

April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.

Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.

Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card

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Half a Million Sharks Finned Each Year in Ecuador

Category: Losing Track
Posted on: December 17, 2008 3:05 PM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

I am the lead author of a new study In Hot Soup: Sharks Captured in Ecuador's Waters out in the journal Environmental Sciences. We reconstructed the shark landings for Ecuador from 1976 to 2004 and demonstrated that Ecuador captures more than 3.5 times the number of sharks they officially report catching--or about half a million sharks each year.

The shark fishery of Ecuador is one of many around the world that feeds the growing Asian demand for sharkfin soup. Fishermen catch more than 40 different shark species and one need only visit a few of the fishing ports along the coast to see shark finning in full effect (such as these juvenile hammerheads captured off Santa Rosa).

Yet, until the 2005 update of fisheries data, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) did not report elasmobranches for Ecuador, indicating that the Ecuadorian government failed to report on these species, probably in part due to the scandalous nature of the shark fin industry.

Our study reconstructed Ecuador's mainland shark landings from the bottom up from 1979 to 2004 using gray literature and shark fin export data. Over this period, shark landings for the Ecuadorian mainland were an estimated 7000 tonnes per year, or nearly half a million sharks. Reconstructed shark landings were about 3.6 times greater than those retroactively reported by FAO from 1991 to 2004.

The discrepancies in data require the urgent implementation of the measures Ecuadorian law mandates: eliminating targeted shark captures, finning, and transshipments, as well as adoption of measures to minimize incidental capture. Most of all, a serious shark landings monitoring system and effective chain of custody standards are needed.

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Comments

Not having read your paper on Ecuador's shark fishery, I don't know the details of the fishery. But I'm betting it is one of those data-poor small-scale fisheries that you and Pauly characterized as "our best option for sustainable use of fisheries resources" in a recent Conservation Biology paper (Funding Priorities: Big Barries to Small-Scale Fisheries). I share your frustration with the bias of subsidies and certification programs toward large-scale fisheries, and it seems intuitive that small-scale fisheries are more sustainable than large-scale ones, but I struggle to reconcile the examples such as this shark fishery in Ecuador with the idea that smaller is better for the fish.

Posted by: K. Stump | December 21, 2008 7:53 AM

I recently saw a program on squid coming more to the surface and spreading northwards along the South and North American coasts. Could it be that the squid are moving up from the lower depths because the sharks just aren't there any more in the upper waters?

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Posted by: liseli | July 9, 2009 6:24 AM

Could it be that the squid are moving up from the lower depths because the sharks just aren't there any more in the upper waters.those retroactively reported ..bad.

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Posted by: sohbet | August 25, 2009 5:18 PM

Shark finning will remove the top predator from teh ocean's food chain over the next few years unless Asia stops this cruel and senseless slaughtering. That in turn would lead to lower forms like algae to grow uncontrollably and your entire fisheries would go down the drain.

INFORM YOURSELF AND STOP EATING A TASTELESS PIECE OF "SEAFOOD" that leaves sharks in agonizing pain. You would not do this to Dolphins (oh wait, the Japanese do!).

http://www.shark-fin-soup.asia

Posted by: Jonas | August 25, 2009 7:03 PM

I struggle to reconcile the examples such as this shark fishery in Ecuador with the idea that smaller is better for the fish.

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