Demon Fish (14 page)

“Sharks have been largely under the radar, even ten years ago. Our attention was more on things that were commercially valuable, or things that were pretty and cute,” he says. “I have more concern about sharks than anything else, because we’ve been aware of these other things for a long time. With sharks, we’re only now getting on top of the problem, let alone thinking of the solutions.”

While academic scientific research can take years or even decades to complete, shark researchers are now rushing to gauge the extent of these animals’ decline. They are scrambling to track how many sharks, and which kinds, humans extract from the sea each year. Without providing a precise body count, they stand little chance of arresting sharks’ march toward extinction.

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DRIED SEAFOOD STREET

It can be a very popular, and a very noble, food.

—Yip Chiu Sung, vice chairman of Hong Kong’s Sharkfin and Marine Products Association, speaking of shark’s fin soup

Probably the best thing that could happen to sharks is that people lose their taste for shark’s fin soup.

—David Balton, deputy assistant secretary of state for oceans and fisheries under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama

E
ach kind of auctioneer has a style. There’s the robust cattle auctioneer, who spits out numbers in a bold, singsong voice that determines where animals go to be bred or slaughtered; the elegant estate auctioneer, whose rich, mellifluous tone entices art and furniture collectors to fork over their savings; and then there’s Charlie Lim.

A spectacled, wiry man in his early fifties, Lim sports a short-sleeved, button-down shirt and a modified bowl cut that lets his straight black bangs fall neatly across his forehead. Standing in front of the sort of shiny whiteboards that appear in classrooms and corporate conference rooms across the globe, he doesn’t talk much as he auctions off his wares; instead, he shakes an abacus in short, regular bursts. Much of the time, the clicking of the beads is the loudest sound in the room.

Lim is a shark fin trader. More precisely, he’s the secretary of Hong Kong’s Sharkfin and Marine Products Association. And at the moment he’s standing in a nondescript auction house whose spare white decor evokes a Chelsea art gallery. But when the auction begins, the buyers crowd around Lim in a semicircle, jostling for a look at the gray triangular fins splayed across the floor. A shark fin auction is as fast as it is secretive. By the time Lim takes his position at the front of the room, one of his assistants has already marked on the board behind him—in a bright red felt-tipped pin—which sorts of fins are being auctioned in any given lot. As soon as men dump the contents of a burlap bag on the floor, the bidding begins: any interested buyer must approach Lim and punch his suggested price into a single device that only the auctioneer and his assistant can see. The bidders must make a calculated guess about what price will prevail, rather than compete with each other openly for a given bag of fins. Within two minutes the lot is sold, and the winning price per kilo is duly noted on the board. Lim’s assistants sweep the pile back into its bag, using a dustpan to gather any errant fins that might have escaped to the side. Another bag—containing the first dorsal, pectorals, and lower lobe of the caudal fins that are most valuable—is dumped on the floor, and the cycle begins again.

The group of men gathered here—and it’s all men—are experienced traders who hear about these auctions through word of mouth. There is no downtime, no chitchat; in fact, there aren’t even chairs for them to sit on during the auction. Given the quick pace of shark fin sales, they must be prepared to bid without hesitation. The bidders show no emotion during the entire process: this isn’t fine art they plan to furnish their homes with, or livestock they will devote months to raising. It is a heap of desiccated objects they will seek to transfer to someone else as soon as they acquire it.

Lim does make a few remarks in Cantonese about the fins before his feet, but it’s not the sort of chatter most auctioneers use to boost the price of a given lot. He’s not saying, “Take a look at these gray beauties!” or anything to that effect. Sometimes he indicates the species that’s collected in a given bag: blacktip, hammerhead, or blue shark. But a shark fin auction is not really about salesmanship. It’s about moving product.

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Some rare metals and stones have carried a high market price for centuries. Basic foodstuffs, including several fish species, have also held a quantifiable commercial value over time. The shark trade, however, is a more recent arrival to the world scene. Unlike many other fish, such as salmon or red snapper, for example, shark does not derive its value from its taste or nutritional worth. In fact, there’s ample evidence that the high levels of toxins sharks accumulate in their bodies pose a potential threat to humans, just as tuna does. While many consumers—especially in China—view shark meat and fins as nutritious, sharks are likely to contain high levels of mercury because they are large, slow-growing fish that consume other fish as their prey, which allows mercury to build up in their muscle tissues. WildAid, an environmental group that crusades against shark fin trafficking, commissioned a study by the Thailand Institute of Scientific and Technological Research in 2001 that found shark fins in Bangkok’s markets contain mercury concentrations up to forty-two times above the safe limit for human health.
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The market for sharks is based more on the animals’ mystique than anything else. In the same way that De Beers has convinced young men across the globe that women will be more likely to accept their marriage proposal if it comes with a diamond ring, men like Lim have managed to persuade Asian consumers that the very presence of stringy shark fin cartilage in their soup speaks to their own social status. Other marketers have different pitches, bottling sharks’ mysterious promise in a range of salves. One U.S. entrepreneur has made a decent amount of money peddling the line that sharks cure cancer, while other companies are in the business of advertising shark oil’s anti-aging properties. None of these appeals are based on science, but they tap into our long-held beliefs about the power of an animal that can consume us. And nowhere do they resonate more strongly than in Asia, where an ever-expanding group of consumers is seeking new ways to demonstrate its upwardly mobile status.

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While the shark fin trade has evolved into a global enterprise, spanning multiple oceans and continents, at one point or another it almost always stops here, in a warren of narrow Hong Kong streets that make up two neighborhoods, Sai Ying Poon and Sheung Wan. It’s hard not to be impressed with the sheer variety of parched delicacies on display: seaweed, scallops, and oysters, all spilling out into the street. Auction houses have glass doors that keep their commodities out of the reach of ordinary customers, but these stores don’t have the same rarefied rules. A nutty, slightly cloying scent pervades the entire neighborhood: the smell of the sea, withered up and left to die.

Roughly half of the world’s shark fins move through Hong Kong, which serves as a gateway for both the mainland Chinese market and other Asian countries that consume shark’s fin soup. Tracking the shark fin trade in recent years has become increasingly complicated as mainland China has started playing a bigger role in directly receiving fin imports from overseas, rather than using Hong Kong as an intermediary. In 2000, the five major markets for shark fins—Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore—reported importing 11,600 metric tons of fins, of which Hong Kong accounted for 47 percent. The numbers keep rising: in 2008, Hong Kong alone imported 10,002 metric tons of fins.
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But as China’s role as an importer of raw shark fins has grown, it’s become harder to track the overall trade because Chinese government figures are so unreliable.

For example, the shark fin trade increased at a steady clip of 5 percent a year during the late 1990s and early twenty-first century (with the exception of 1998, when the Asian financial crisis depressed sales). But in recent years Hong Kong imports have dipped slightly, clocking in at 5,337 metric tons in 2006. This is due in part to the fin trade shifting to other cities in China, but it’s hard to gauge what’s happening there. Shelley Clarke, a biology professor at Imperial College London who knows the shark fin trade better than most people on earth, says China underestimates its fin imports by anywhere from 24 to 49 percent.
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Clarke has made a career of studying shark fin trading. While she doesn’t blend in with the crowd in Sai Ying Poon—she is British, with fair skin and strawberry blond hair—Clarke has lived in Asia for more than a dozen years, and is fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese. As a graduate student, she made it her mission to infiltrate shark trade auctions, to get a sense of which types of sharks ended up on the chopping block, since traders use names that are not strict translations and often correlate to, but are not identical with, certain species. (Basking shark falls into the “Nuo Wei Tian Jiu” fin category, for example, but it’s not the Mandarin term for that species.) To ferret out these distinctions, Clarke—working with Mahmood Shivji, a Nova Southeastern University professor, and Ellen Pikitch, executive director of Stony Brook University’s Institute for Ocean Conservation Science—used DNA analysis to figure out which species were being traded and then used mathematical formulas to get a sense of how many sharks are killed overall and sold each year for their fins.

Their conclusion: 73 million sharks are being caught and killed worldwide each year to supply the fin trade. And regardless of modest market shifts, Hong Kong remains the center of the global shark fin trade. The majority of shark fins come in by boat, though a small portion come in by plane: in 2006 a grand total of eighty-four countries shipped fins here, and by 2008 the number of nations had risen to eighty-seven. While the order shifts from time to time, the list of countries bringing fins to Hong Kong remains pretty much the same, with Spain, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates topping the list. The United States used to rank relatively high until President Bill Clinton, facing little political resistance, established a shark-finning ban off America’s coasts at the end of his term in office.

The shark fin trade encompasses anywhere from thirty to forty different kinds of sharks at any given time, though the Hong Kong market tends to focus on about fourteen species, ranging from blue shark to scalloped hammerhead. Still, it’s size rather than species that matters when it comes to price. Shark fins can sell for $880 per pound or more on the Hong Kong market, and a single fin from a basking shark—the second-largest fish in the world—sold in Singapore in 2003 for $57,000 (all values throughout are in U.S. dollars).

While several species, like the great white, whale, and basking sharks, are prized for their immensity, it’s the fish nicknamed “the rabbit of the sea” that keeps the fin market humming. Blue sharks are the workhorses, the ones that reproduce regularly and aren’t about to chew the fishermen who catch them into little bits. They make up at least 17 percent of the international shark fin trade, according to Clarke and Shivji, which means at least 10.7 million blue sharks—which fishermen from Mexico to Indonesia pull ashore—are killed annually. When you match those numbers with the stock assessments fishery experts have done of blue shark populations in the Atlantic and north Pacific, it comes close to those stocks’ “maximum sustainable yield.” And the fact that we’re taking as many blue sharks out of the sea each year as it can afford to give up worries Clarke, since, in her words, “any catch that approaches or exceeds this level is of concern.”

Fins arrive in Hong Kong because the place epitomizes trading. More than a decade after the United Kingdom relinquished its 155-year-old hold on Hong Kong and handed it to China as a “special administrative region,” this 426-square-mile territory of roughly seven million people still excels at buying and selling goods. (Ten years after the handover, it had a higher per capita gross domestic product than Europe’s four biggest economies, as well as Japan’s.) At times the major islands that make up Hong Kong resemble different versions of the same mall, with air-conditioning blasting from shops into the streets and brightly colored neon signs touting different products with unbridled enthusiasm.

Decades ago, when Hong Kongers were more focused on producing goods rather than just passing them along, they used to hunt sharks. As far back as 1940, one Hong Kong resident named S. Y. Lin reported, “Sharks are plentiful, sharks are everywhere,” and by the 1960s a specific fishery aimed at catching sharks had started booming here. Shark slaying was never a prestigious occupation: most fishermen belonged to a social caste called the Hokklos, hailing from China’s Guangdong and Fujian provinces. Treated like social outsiders, Hokklos remain segregated today in Hong Kong society and can occasionally be spotted walking the streets in hobo-like clothing.