Demon Fish (36 page)

“Their skill is to take this complex subject and put it in a way that’s simple but powerful,” she explains as she pulls out sketches for the next ad campaign she and Saatchi & Saatchi are cooking up.

Groups across the globe have their respective pitchmen: the Pew Environment Group has got shark attack survivors to make the case for shark preservation, while Oceana enlisted January Jones, a Hollywood actor who has made her mark as the long-suffering suburban housewife Betty Draper on the television series
Mad Men
. In each case, the appeal is the same: we pose the real danger to sharks, not the other way around.

Oceana’s chief scientist, Michael Hirshfield, feels confident his group has gotten the right person to make its case. “It’s the surprise factor. It’s not your big macho surfer dude. It’s a petite actress, who instead of being afraid of sharks is afraid for them.”

There’s no question that Jones—a striking blonde who sported a formfitting black dress and high heels as she made her congressional rounds—is an effective lobbyist. A South Dakota native, she has gotten the state’s one Democratic senator, Tim Johnson, to co-sponsor a measure banning the finning of sharks in U.S. waters. Not only that, she has so endeared herself to McCain (who declined to press for shark conservation measures once he returned to the Senate in 2009, despite his campaign trail declarations) that he not only signed on to the same bill but gave her a thirty-minute tour of the Capitol and walked her to her car.

The day Jones launches her Capitol Hill charm offensive—September 30, 2009—Hirshfield is triumphant. “You heard it here first, it’s the turning point for sharks,” he says. “The day January Jones came to Washington.”

About six months later, representatives from 175 nations demonstrated that Hirshfield might be a little premature in declaring victory. The delegates who gathered at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora considered four separate proposals to protect eight species of sharks: scalloped hammerhead, smooth hammerhead, great hammerhead, dusky, sandbar, oceanic whitetip, porbeagle, and spiny dogfish. The small island nation of Palau—which created its shark sanctuary just days before January Jones was paying her courtesy calls at the Senate—had joined forces with the United States and the European Union to press for the trade measures, which would have monitored international sales of these species to ensure they were sustainable. Palau’s president, Johnson Toribiong, sent a message to delegates explaining that while he’s banned shark fishing within two hundred nautical miles of his country’s coasts, an area roughly the size of France, “Palau cannot protect our environment alone.” Advocates came armed with plenty of statistics on how fishing has wiped out as much as 99 percent of some of these sharks’ populations, hoping that alone would secure the two-thirds majority they needed for passage.

But a cadre of coastal nations, along with major fish consumers such as Japan and China, beat back the proposals. Grenada’s chief fisheries officer, Justin Rennie, who pushed for a secret ballot on some votes, called the decision to protect hammerheads “arbitrary.” In an interview the day before the final day of voting, Rennie explained that while countries like his are willing to take some responsibility for their use of the ocean, Americans and Europeans can’t expect them to relinquish their economic claim on the sea altogether. For many of them, he explained, their exclusive economic zone in the ocean is fifty times larger than their country’s land area: “We have very little opportunity on the land. That is why we look toward the sea.”

For a short while it looked as if activists had scored at least one victory when delegates adopted the proposal to monitor the trade of porbeagle sharks, which have declined by at least 80 percent in the northeast and southwest Atlantic Ocean. But the convention has a quirky rule: delegates can revote on any proposal on the last day of the conference, and the result of that balloting is the one that carries the day. So just hours before the gathering ended, opponents called for one more vote on the porbeagle protections. The measure failed to get the two-thirds majority it needed by a margin of two votes, as members of the Japanese delegation stood at the back of the room, shaking each other’s hands in congratulations. The delegates to the world’s largest wildlife-trafficking conference, which occurs only every three years, left sharks swimming on the high seas exactly where they’ve always been, with no international catch limits whatsoever.

John Scanlon, the Australian who took over as secretary general of CITES after that meeting in Doha, has a soft spot for sharks. He hopes a report from a joint U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization–CITES workshop held in the wake of the failed votes—which focused on how shark species that might face new trade restricitions are faring and what such curbs would look like—might help broker a future compromise on the issue. “The issue has not gone away, by any stretch,” Scanlon says. “Sharks will definitely come back.”

Scanlon was right. Delegates to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas had resisted the idea of limiting shark fishing for years. But in November 2010 the commission banned the catch, retention, and sale of seven species in the Atlantic Ocean—oceanic whitetips and six types of hammerheads: great, scalloped, scoophead, smalleye, smooth, and whitefin. But member nations balked at protecting the species fueling the bulk of shark fin trade, rejecting catch limits the United States proposed on shortfin makos.

Shark conservation, it turns out, is only partly a matter of finding the exact sales pitch and the right person to deliver it. While activists have finally mastered the science and the message, it takes time to shift the mind-set of both the public and policy makers. The question is how much time the sharks have left.

9

GAWKING AT JAWS

I am very grateful to the sea because for the little I have, it was given to me from the sea.

—Luis “Meli” Muñoz, La Paz fisherman

S
hark fishing in Mexico is a matter of economics and tradition. This nation has been catching sharks since the time of the Aztecs and the Olmecs, gloried civilizations that made distinctions between the different shark species swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. Even now Mexico remains one of the top shark-fishing nations in the world: men on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts troll for sharks that will primarily go for domestic consumption, whether it’s a dry, shredded jerky many Mexicans love or meat for fish tacos or for the Chinese restaurants in Mexico City that offer shark’s fin soup. But Mexico—like a handful of other nations, such as South Africa—represents the crossroads we find ourselves at when it comes to our relationship to sharks. It embodies our past, but could offer us a very different future.

One of the Mexican areas that still sustains a lively shark trade is La Paz, a major city on the Baja California peninsula, and the small towns that surround it. Now boasting roughly 200,000 residents, La Paz no longer embodies its name, which means “Peace” in Spanish. Its downtown waterfront promenade features an Applebee’s as well as multiple realtors’ offices, and is usually clogged with cars regardless of the time of day. As the capital of Baja California Sur, La Paz is the state’s economic center, the biggest of several fishing towns scattered up and down the peninsula. John Steinbeck traveled there in 1940 with his friend Ed “Doc” Ricketts, a marine biologist, aboard a seventy-six-foot sardine boat dubbed the
Western Flyer
, and the two men translated their six-week, four-thousand-mile expedition into the book
Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research
. Later, Steinbeck paid homage to La Paz in his novella
The Pearl
, describing how divers there sought out what they hoped would be the “Pearl of the World.”

Baja still banks on its marine resources to generate commercial, as well as tourist, dollars. Partyers flock to Cabo San Lucas (immortalized in the 1970s television series
The Love Boat
in well-worn lines such as Captain Stubing’s remark to Julie, “Do you like my sombrero? I picked it up in Cabo San Lucas!”) to the south, while ecotourists head farther north to see the gray whales, which congregate there in the late winter and early spring. The hardiest visitors usually opt for kayaking trips to the island of Espíritu Santo, which lies fifteen miles from La Paz. Steinbeck described the somewhat forbidding island as standing “high and sheer from the water.”

But when it comes to defining Baja’s cultural identity, fishing still dominates. The practice sustains tiny outposts like Las Barrancas, a Baja town five hours north of La Paz. Getting there is arduous. While there is technically a highway stretching from La Paz to a turnoff not far from Las Barrancas, this “highway” is more like a series of cratered potholes, strung together by small stretches of dirt. Driving there in a tiny rental car with my future husband, Andrew, and two researchers from the Mexican conservation group Iemanya Oceanica, we careen wildly from side to side on the road. Our assumption: skidding off the highway’s edge is a safer bet than dipping into one of the potholes, at which point our rental compact will surely crumple in on itself. We were right.

Far removed from either the state’s whale-watching center or its cruise ship ports, Las Barrancas is composed of a handful of shacks with corrugated metal roofs, the biggest of which have a beaten pickup truck standing out front. For most of the day, Las Barrancas is pretty much silent. At around 2:00 p.m., however, the fishing boats come in, and the entire town—about a dozen people—troops down to the beach to meet the fishermen and help process the fish.

One spring afternoon—the day we come to visit—Francisco and Armando Bareno, two brothers, manage to haul in nearly two dozen mako and blue sharks. The brothers have left their nets out for two days due to bad weather, so by the time they drag in their catch, the sharks are glassy-eyed and lifeless. In addition to having dull expressions, the sharks are less than formidable in size: all of them are clearly juveniles, about three or four feet long.

Standing in the shallow water, the Barenos methodically dismember the animals, always in the same order, in a process that takes less than sixty seconds per shark. After cutting off the head, they slice off the fins—the most valuable part of the body—and place them into one set of brightly colored plastic crates. Then they gut the animal, cut off the tail, and throw the remaining meat into a separate set of crates.

Just yards away on the beach, an aged white truck idles, waiting to take the Barenos’ haul to Mexico City. Unlike countries such as Indonesia, Mexico consumes an estimated 90 percent of its shark catch, mostly as a dried, shredded jerky. The Barenos couldn’t sell the fins right away, since they needed to dry them first: once dry, they fetch 1,000 pesos, or about $100, per kilo. By contrast, they hand over the fresh shark meat to the wholesalers waiting with their Mexico City–bound truck for just 15 pesos, or $1.50, a kilo. (As another Baja fisherman put it, “The fins are what bring the money.”)

Francisco Bareno leans against the truck as I ask him in Spanish whether he enjoys shark fishing. “Not much,” he replies, “but I have to live.”

One of the reasons Mexican shark fishermen are less than enthusiastic about their trade nowadays is there are fewer fish to catch. Mexican authorities have little idea of how many sharks their fishermen catch each year, so on Valentine’s Day 2007 they passed a law requiring observers on larger shark-fishing vessels and satellite tracking of these ships. The law, which also prohibits large commercial shark fishing within twenty miles of Mexico’s shores and grants special protection for great white, whale, and basking sharks, aims to provide regulators with an overview of how many sharks are killed in their waters.

Many Mexican fishermen are skeptical of the law. Manuel Espinoza Álvarez, who lives in La Paz and has spent thirty of his forty-four years working at sea, resents the fact that the government lets some large vessels scour the region’s depths for fish while he and other fishermen struggle to make a living. Like Francisco, he works with his brother, and he suspects the additional regulations will undermine his already-precarious standard of living along the shore. “Where’s the benefit for us?” he asks.

Paul Ahuja is one of the people who spend their time trying to convince Espinoza that protecting sharks is a smart economic move. A lanky, bearded six-foot-five-inch New Yorker, Ahuja stands out in a crowd when he walks the streets of La Paz. (He likes to say he resembles “Gulliver among the Lilliputians.”) Now in his mid-forties, Ahuja came to Baja by a circuitous route: he joined the U.S. Army before heading to grad school in California, and initially came to La Paz not to track sharks but to study the giant mantas that swam in the Sea of Cortez. Within a couple of years the giant mantas—huge, flapping creatures that look like bats or aliens, depending on your perspective—disappeared. But Ahuja stayed on as Mexico research director for Iemanya Oceanica, in an attempt to make sure Mexican sharks do not go the way of his beloved mantas.