New York Times.com

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Large glass bottles of desiccated shark fins grace the upper shelves of nearly every convenience store and grocery in Chinatown, bearing price tags — from $100 to more than $500 per pound — that reflect the market value of a delicacy that has been served for centuries.

Shark fin soup is a traditional Chinese banquet dish, believed to bring good luck and numerous health benefits. Today, it is mostly served at weddings and other celebrations as the ultimate demonstration of a host’s wealth and hospitality.

But now, that tradition is slowly being legislated off menus and market shelves across parts of the United States.

On Tuesday, legislators in New York State announced a bill that, following the example of Western states, would ban the sale, trading, possession and distribution of shark fins, possibly as of 2013. California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington are enacting similar bans that were passed last year, while Florida, Illinois, Maryland and Virginia have legislation pending.

The bill in New York is sponsored in the Assembly by Alan Maisel, Linda B. Rosenthal and Grace Meng, who represents the heavily Asian district of Flushing, Queens, and is the only Asian-American in the Assembly. Identical bills are expected to be introduced in both houses of the Legislature.

Ms. Meng, the daughter of immigrants who worked in and owned Chinese restaurants, said at a news conference in Manhattan on Tuesday that she “loved shark fin soup.”

“This is going to be a huge adjustment for the community,” she added, “but it’s important to be responsible citizens.”

Scientists estimate that up to 73 million sharks are killed annually to satisfy the appetite for shark fin soup, leading some species to the brink of extinction and depleting oceans of a key ecosystem predator. Since the fin is so much more valuable than the rest of the shark, fishermen often slice it off and push the still-writhing shark back into the sea to die, although many governments ban the practice.

At the same time, younger generations of Chinese diners, in the West but also in places like Hong Kong and Shanghai, have displayed far less devotion to a high-end dish that they view as environmentally unsound. Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball star, has campaigned against the consumption of shark fin soup with the conservation group Wild Aid in both Asia and North America.

While many restaurants in Chinatown said that a ban would hurt their business, managers predicted that most clients would be only too happy to have it off the menu.

“It’s only the elderly who want it: when their grandkids get married, they want the most expensive stuff, like an emperor,” said Vincent Yu, a waiter at Grand Harmony Palace, where the soup sells for $30 to more than $100 a bowl, depending on whether the meat it contains is pure shark fin or mixed with shrimp or chicken. Alluding to the famously tasteless nature of the fins, he added, “Guests offer me a bowl all the time, but I like won-ton soup.”

Grand Harmony and many other Chinatown banquet halls are already developing high-end substitutes for shark fin soup, using other kinds of fish, abalone or tofu.

There are dozens of large banquet halls in New York City, serving the equivalent of 1,000 fins each month, estimated Patrick Kwan, the New York director of the Humane Society of the United States, which has campaigned for a bill. He said the soup was not crucial to Chinese culture: it is “nothing more than a status symbol — a ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ ”

Dr. Michael Hirschfield, chief scientist of the conservation groups Oceana, said adding New York to the list of states banning shark fins would have an outsize effect, potentially quashing the American trade of fins once the West Coast bans take effect this year, because New York is the major East Coast importer.

Businesses in Chinatown are preparing for a shark fin phase-out. Nancy Ng, the manager at Po Wing Hong Food Market on Elizabeth Street, said that when she saw California had passed a ban last fall, she stopped ordering new shark fins, reasoning that New York would probably follow its example.

Anyway, she said, the price went up about $50 a pound in the last six months for many of the fins in her store, whose prices vary depending on size, color and quality.

“It’s gotten so expensive,” she said, “so there’s much less of a market.”

Photo Copyright PangeaSeed 2012

Forbes.com

By Terry Waghorn

Huffington Post

By Adrian Grenier and Andrew Sharpless

Floridians depend on the ocean. And we understand. It’s in your blood.

Florida’s waters weave themselves into the daily life of most who call this state home and with so much to offer, it’s easy to understand why. In addition to supporting recreation, fishing and the local economy, the oceans are home to a diverse array of life.

But we cannot keep taking without giving back. Suffering from overfishing, pollution and climate change, the oceans are in trouble and they need our help. One species that has been hit hardest by these devastating issues, especially off the coast of Florida, is sharks. Although sharks have been on this planet for more than 400 million years, their numbers are now plummeting, and the consequences are yet to be fully understood.

Luckily, the sunshine state has started to recognize how vital shark conservation is to protecting ocean life. Just recently, the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission voted to add protections for several sharks, including tiger and scalloped hammerheads. For ocean advocates like us, this is great news.

But there’s still work to be done. Florida should follow in the footsteps of other states like Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, and implement a ban on the shark fin trade. Shark finning involves the cruel and destructive practice of cutting off a shark’s fins while its body is often thrown overboard where it is left to die.

Did you know that it’s currently legal in Florida to sell, possess and distribute shark fins? This needs to change.

Floridians know how important the oceans are to the health of their community, and with more than 1,100 miles of coastline to its name, Florida has an opportunity to live up to its reputation in protecting sharks and the ocean ecosystems they call home.

If you’re as passionate about saving sharks and protecting the waters they live in as we are, then join us at Oceana’s inaugural ‘SeaBlue’ event at W Fort Lauderdale on March 3. Only through working together can we help ensure that future generations inherit healthy oceans.

Visit www.seablueevent.org to learn more about this exciting event. Help save sharks. Help save the oceans.

The Guardian UK

By Kate Hodal

• Michael Skoletsky, Shark Savers wrote:

Singapore. It may be politically incorrect, but three marine life experts said at a forum on Thursday that it makes no sense to ban the sale of shark’s fin. But a fourth expert stood his ground, insisting a temporary ban on shark’s fin and meat would reduce the killing.

A debate over this controversial topic played out at a forum organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, attended by about 100 people. In one corner were Giam Choo Hoo, a member of the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites); Professor Steve Oakley, Shark Savers Malaysia chairman; and Hank Jenkins, president of conservation outfit Species Management Specialists.

In another corner, supported by the majority of the audience, was Louis Ng, executive director of Singapore animal advocacy group Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Acres).

The topic has garnered recent interest here after a string of local supermarkets, such as Carrefour and FairPrice, and hotels like Shangri-La pledged to stop serving or selling the dish.

A global movement to outlaw the trade of shark’s fin has also been gaining momentum as well as converts, who believe that the dish is inhumane and endangers the shark population.

But Giam, Oakley and Jenkins all claim that prohibiting its trade will not dramatically reduce the number of sharks killed worldwide. They noted that many countries such as Germany, France, Australia and Iceland have long killed sharks for their meat.

“Even if shark’s fin were banned, these countries would continue to catch sharks for the meat,” Oakley said.

Giam armed his presentation with figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization: In 2009, 70 per cent of caught sharks were by fishermen in developing countries.

“From my own research, fishermen in these countries are mostly poor and will eat every part of the shark,” said the former deputy director at the Primary Production Department, the predecessor of the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA).

But Ng countered that these fishermen could be better supported through eco-tourism, where divers pay to swim with the sharks. In the Bahamas, such trips are worth US$78 million (S$99 million) to its economy each year. This would also be more sustainable in the long run, he said.

Shark protectors claim the dish kills up to 73 million sharks each year, with some of them tossed back into the sea to die after their fins are cut off.

But Jenkins took aim at the statistics and pooh-poohed this widely held belief. He said the 73 million figure, attributed to marine scientist Shelley Clarke and cited by shark advocacy groups such as WildAid and Shark Angels, had been twisted to suit their needs.

Clarke herself took to marine sustainability website SeaWeb last year to lambast such misuse of her work. She said she had estimated in 2000 that the fins of 38 million sharks were being traded, although the true figure was likely between 26 million and 73 million.

The three panelists also insist there is no evidence that live finning – cutting sharks’ fins off before throwing the sharks back into the sea – is a prevalent practice. “Although practiced by some fishermen, it is illegal, relatively infrequent and condemned by the industry,” Jenkins said.

Ng was not convinced. He cited 2008 data that showed that fins commonly sell for US$250 or more per pound (450g), far more than the measly dollars per pound for shark meat.

In an interview with reporters after the forum, he stuck to his guns: ‘We’re calling for a temporary ban. Let the shark populations recover, put in place proper management, and make sure that the trade is sustainable before we start consumption again.’

But all four panelists agreed that more information on the sharks’ plight is needed. A 2010 report by non-profit group International Union for Conservation of Nature said there is not enough information on 47 per cent of shark and related species to know if they are endangered.

The panelists added that governments need to do more to regulate the trade of sharks. Oakley said this could involve making sure fisheries keep the number of sharks above a mandated minimum level. Sharks could then reproduce at a sustainable rate.

As for Singapore, Jenkins said it could source its fins from sustainable producers. Last year, the Republic imported about 3,500 tonnes of shark’s fin, 40 per cent more than the previous year.

The AVA said Singapore abides by the Cites agreement, under which the basking shark, whale shark, great white shark and sawfishes are protected species and their trade is strictly regulated. It allows only licensed fish dealers to import sharks and shark’s fin.

Joan Paul, 22, a student who attended the forum, said she will still boycott shark’s fin. “By choosing not to eat shark’s fin, you are thinking in the long term. When there’s supply for shark’s fin, there’s bound to be demand,” she said.

Photo Copyright PangeaSeed 2012

SFGate.com

By Carla Marinucci

President Obama, who signed the Shark Conservation Act into law last month, apparently didn’t check out the menu before he made a surprise visit Thursday to a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown that is among a handful still serving shark fin soup, a delicacy that has been outlawed in California.

The Great Eastern restaurant, a Chinatown landmark on Jackson Street, has a $48 single serving of braised shark fin soup on its menu, and was the site of the president’s drop-in after he landed in San Francisco to attend three fundraising events.

Obama made an unannounced visit to the venue, according to a pool report provided of the event, entering the restaurant wearing no jacket and with his sleeves rolled up. Patrons, “mostly of Chinese origin, shrieked, ‘Obama! Obama!’ … getting up out of their chairs, rushing to the president and leaving plates of low mein behind,” according to the report.

“How are you? Good to see you!” Obama told diners.

The president “spent time working the dining room, posing for pictures and shaking hands,” then picked up an order of two bags of food to take out, paying for his meal at the cashier’s desk, the report said.

His motorcade attracted huge crowds as it wended through the San Francisco streets on the way to his first of two fundraising events on Nob Hill.

The president ordered shrimp dumplings, pork dumplings, steamed pork buns, Shanghai dumplings and stuffed mushrooms – but no soup of any kind, including shark fin soup that the Great Eastern sells in three varieties, a restaurant employee said.

Distribution and sale of shark fin products – which cost hundreds of dollars per pound – were outlawed in California after a roiling debate that accompanied passage of AB-376 by Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-Cupertino, last year. The legislation aimed to ban what supporters said was a legacy of horrific cruelty and deep ecological impacts on the species with the capture of millions of sharks annually for the delicacy.

The soup, for hundreds of years a specialty favorite at Asian celebrations, remains on sale in a few San Francisco venues as a result of a loophole in the law that is also being challenged in the courts.

The ban on shark products, signed into law in October by Gov. Jerry Brown, went into effect on Jan. 1. But it allowed for the sale and use of fins already in California – one of the largest markets in the world for such products – until July 1, 2013.

The Shark Conservation Act, signed by Obama on Jan. 4, aims to protect most shark species from being harvested for their fins and prohibits cutting fins of a shark at sea. Federal law allows shark fin suppliers to sell the product if the fin was obtained legally, which requires keeping the carcass intact.

The Save Our Seas Foundation, an ocean protection group, has estimated that as many as 72 million sharks annually are subjected to “finning,” a process of slicing off their fins and leaving them to die, for culinary purposes.

A San Francisco-based association of shark fin suppliers sued the state recently over the passage of the California ban of shark fin products. It said the new law violates Congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce.

Great Eastern, a local Chinatown favorite, is highly regarded for its menu and was cited in by San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer on Monday as one of the region’s best restaurants.

Only nine restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of the largest Chinese American community outside of mainland China, still serve the soup, according to an Internet search.

Chronicle staff writers Suzanne Herel and Jill Tucker contributed to this report.

Photo Copyright PangeaSeed 2012

By MOHAMED NASHEED

DICTATORSHIPS don’t always die when the dictator leaves office. The wave of revolutions that toppled autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen last year was certainly cause for hope. But the people of those countries should be aware that, long after the revolutions, powerful networks of regime loyalists can remain behind and can attempt to strangle their nascent democracies.

I learned this lesson quickly. My country, the Maldives, voted out President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, its iron-fisted ruler, back in 2008, in historic elections that swept away three decades of his authoritarian rule. And yet the dictatorship bequeathed to the infant democracy a looted treasury, a ballooning budget deficit and a rotten judiciary.

I was elected that year, and with the help of the International Monetary Fund, my government worked to cut the deficit, while also building a modern tax base. For the first time in its history, the Maldives — a group of islands in the Indian Ocean — had a democratically elected president, parliament and local councils.

But it also had a judiciary handpicked by the former president, which was now hiding behind a democratic constitution. These powerful judges provided protection for the former president, his family members and political allies, many of whom are accused of corruption, embezzlement and human rights crimes.

At the same time, new laws guaranteeing freedom of speech were abused by a new force in Maldivian politics: Islamic extremists. The former president’s cabinet members threw anti-Semitic and anti-Christian slurs at my government, branding as apostates anyone who tried to defend the country’s liberal Islamic traditions and claiming that democracy granted them and their allies license to call for violent jihad and indulge in hate speech.

In response to these issues, my government asked the United Nations to help us investigate judicial abuses and ordered the arrest of Abdulla Mohamed, the chief judge of the criminal court, on charges of protecting the former president and corrupting the judicial system. However, in a dramatic turn of events on Tuesday, the former president’s supporters protested in the streets, and police officers and army personnel loyal to the old government mutinied and forced me, at gunpoint, to resign. To avoid bloodshed, I did so. I believe this to be a coup d’état and suspect that my vice president, who has since been sworn into office, helped to plan it.

Choosing to stand up to the judge was a controversial decision, but I feel I had no choice but to do what I did — to have taken no action, and passively watched the country’s democracy strangled, would have been the greatest injustice of all.

The problems we are facing in the Maldives are a warning for other Muslim nations undergoing democratic reform. At times, dealing with the corrupt system of patronage the former regime left behind can feel like wrestling with a Hydra: when you remove one head, two more grow back. With patience and determination, the beast can be slain. But let the Maldives be a lesson for aspiring democrats everywhere: the dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship.

Joystiq.com

By JC Fletcher

Derrick the Deathfin is an angsty teenage shark who suffers tragedy when his parents are canned as shark fin soup. In response, Derrick begins a worldwide campaign of revenge, destroying every manmade structure he can find. Because he’s a shark, he must continually eat fish along his path, and he must keep moving at all times to stay alive.

He, like everything else in his world, is made of paper.

That’s the basic setup of Derrick the Deathfin, a new downloadable game coming to PS3 this summer. It’s the work of developer Different Tuna, a collaboration between Lilt Line developer Different Cloth, Cletus Clay’s Tuna, and artist Ronzo — supported financially by Channel 4 and Screen Yorkshire.

“In terms of gameplay, you could consider Derrick to be the illegitimate lovechild of Sonic the Hedgehog and Ecco the Dolphin,” explained Different Cloth “head of everything” Gordon Midwood. “So lots of fast paced action, but also some swimming too.” Derrick will bring his reign of terror through 32 levels (in “3 different level types”) across four continents. You can see gameplay in the above trailer — Derrick swims at high speed, rocket-jumps out of water, eats everything in his path and routinely burps bones.

As for the look, artist Ronzo took it as a challenge. “When the first feedback from the people involved was: ‘Underwater world made out of paper – that’s impossible’. I thought: Let’s do it,” he said. “Gordon is very open for new angles and has a great sense of humour. He immediately loved the idea and so we went with it. It’s always a great start to a project when you get given free range and the people your work with encourage you. That’s the best basis to create something crazy and wonderful.”

The papercraft style is based on Ronzo’s previous work, but more “colourful, friendly and vibrant.” Surprisingly, it all starts with real paper models. “First I sketched the characters and environments to get an idea what it should look like,” Ronzo said. “These drawings then got turned into paper models at my studio. It’s a mixture of origami and old school kindergarten model building technique. Once the models were made, we shot in front of a blue background them from all sides. From the pictures I comped together scenes of the worlds in the computer. These comps then got handed over to the specialist CGI production house ten24. They did a great job re-creating and animating all the characters and objects in 3D.” Ronzo is “super happy” with the resulting look. “It looks mega papery and I have never seen anything like it done in games before.” You can see more of the process that turned paper into fish, then into 3D models in our gallery.

Different Tuna is self-publishing the title (“Is it that obvious?” Midwood joked) on PSN. “The intention was always to make a console game,” Midwood told us, “so we decided to try Sony out first and see what they would say.” Sony agreed to let Different Tuna publish the title on PS3, and “the rest – as they say – is history. Or at least the rest is stuff that happened in the past.”

UT San Diego.com

Written by Mike Lee

An electronic ID tag from a rare shark spotted off the county’s coast in June has popped to the surface near Hawaii, providing local marine researchers with an unprecedented look into the long-distance movements of the second-largest known fish.

Basking sharks have almost disappeared from the West Coast, but biologists at the National Marine Fisheries Service in La Jolla found two last year and outfitted them with satellite-based tracking devices in hopes of learning more about where they roam. One tag fell off after several days but the other lasted eight months — enough to provide the first long-term track of a basking shark moving across the Pacific Ocean.

“It’s a big gold mine,” said Heidi Dewar at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “Now we know for sure that our animals can go to the central Pacific.”

The long-distance tag, which surfaced on Feb. 2, uploaded long streams of data about where the shark traveled, water temperatures it encountered and the animal’s depth as it traveled.

“We can look to see how the habitat use changes as it moves from coastal habitat to offshore habitat,” Dewar said. “That becomes important in the context of management and conservation.”

Agencies in Canada, Mexico and the United States are trying to safeguard basking sharks, which once gathered near the coastline by the hundreds or thousands. In recent years, however, sightings have dwindled and biologists have speculated that as few as 300 swim along the West Coast.

While basking sharks have gaping mouths and can grow up to 40 feet, they aren’t a threat to people. They are filter feeders that consume large volumes of zooplankton. As their name implies, basking sharks spend a lot of time at the surface — at least when they are near the coast — and are notably docile when researchers approach.

Still, they once were targeted for eradication off Canada because they got snagged in fishing nets. The population may also suffer because the sharks don’t appear to be frightened by oncoming boats enough to get out of the way.

At the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation in Santa Cruz, executive director Sean Van Sommeran said he started receiving data from a basking shark tagged near Pacific Grove in August. The tag — part of a project with NOAA, Stanford University and the foundation — released from the shark hundreds of miles off Baja California, providing researchers with a treasure trove of travel information.

“I would characterize it as an avalanche of data,” said Van Sommeran said Monday.

He compared the current advancements in basking shark research to similar breakthroughs for white sharks about a decade ago. Both species were once thought to stay primarily along the coast.

“They are moving farther and wider than was previously understood or believed,” Van Sommeran said.

Dewar said new data about the basking shark’s trip to Hawaii is both exciting and daunting, because it means that effective protections must account for international waters. That’s difficult because basking shark fins can fetch tens of thousands of dollars for an Asian soup that some consider a delicacy.

Dewar and her colleagues ramped up an outreach campaign about basking sharks last summer in hopes of getting real-time tips from divers, boaters and others who see them. The researchers have two more satellite tags they are hoping to deploy in late spring, when basking sharks tend to be spotted in local waters.

This time, Dewar plans to program the tags to stay attached longer than eight months in hopes of determining what basking sharks do after they reach the central Pacific. Do they keep going to Indonesia? Do they turn around? Do they roam there for years?

The federal research group’s website is http://swfsc.noaa.gov/baskingshark/. Sightings can be reported to (858) 334-2884 or basking.shark@noaa.gov. For each encounter, scientists want to know the date and time, latitude and longitude (or at least the general location), the animal’s estimated length, the number of basking sharks in the area, and other details such as water temperature. They also want photos and videos.

Photo Copyright Greg Skomal 2011

Huffington Post.com

By: Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Video of a dead whale shark being pulled from the sea off of Pakistan raises more questions about the school-bus-size fish’s demise than it answers, scientists say.

Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune posted video on Tuesday (Feb. 7) of a crane hauling a whale shark carcass onto a pier in Karachi. According to the newspaper, the owner of the nearby Charai Fishery, spotted the animal floating “unconscious” 10 days earlier, 93 miles (150 kilometers) from the fishery. [See video of whale shark]

But sharks don’t fall unconscious, said Bob Hueter, the director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. And if they stop swimming for any reason, they aren’t likely to bob along with the currents.

“If and when they die, they don’t float, they sink,” Hueter told LiveScience. “So to have one just kind of wash up is very rare. I can only think of a few cases over the years around the world where this is happened.”

It’s impossible to tell from the video and news stories what really happened to the whale shark, said Jennifer Schmidt, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies whale sharks.

“It’s possible the shark was sick, and was brought into port when it finally appeared to be dead,” Schmidt told LiveScience. “It’s also known, however, that Pakistan hunts whale sharks, so it’s possible this is a cover story for a whale shark hunt that couldn’t avoid notice.”

The shark, a member of the largest species of fish on Earth, was reportedly about 40 feet (12 meters) long and required at least three cranes to pull it onto the pier, after which it was sold for 200,000 rupees, approximately $2,200 (earlier reports had pegged the price at 1.7 million rupees). According to the Dawn newspaper, the buyer will put the animal on display for fee-paying viewers for three days and then sell the meat to poultry-feed producers.

Whale sharks are listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, but it’s up to individual countries to enforce limits on killing the creatures.

From the photos, Schmidt guessed that the shark was a male. At 40 feet long, she said, he would have been about 30 years old and of breeding age.

“The death of an adult breeding animal is unfortunate under any circumstances, as his valuable contribution to shark numbers and genetic diversity is lost,” she said. “Recent studies have shown that known whale shark populations, at least in some areas, are shifting toward smaller animals not old enough to breed. This suggests the larger reproducing sharks are being selectively depleted, likely targeted by fisheries, which will further endanger the status of whale sharks if reproduction declines.”

Whale shark meat is eaten around the world, and the animals’ fins, like those of many sharks, are expensive delicacies in Asia. But if the shark did indeed die long before fisherman found it, it’s unlikely that it would be fit for human consumption.

“Decomposition is very rapid in an animal like that, and sharks, on top of that, have high levels of these ammonia-type substances in their tissues,” Hueter said. “When they start to rot, it’s pretty bad.”

All photos copyright: (ASIF HASSAN/AFP/Getty Images)