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cdiver2
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10,000 sea turtles authorized for kills
By Chrissie Thompson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 3, 2006
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) allows commercial fishermen to kill almost 10,000 sea turtles annually and injure 334,000 more, according to a report released last week by Oceana, an environmental activism organization.
The report marked the first tabulation of all government-authorized sea-turtle casualties from commercial fishing. Elizabeth Griffin, an Oceana marine wildlife scientist and the report's author, said the NMFS allows a certain number of casualties even though there is no estimate on how many endangered sea turtles remain in the wild.
"One of our biggest concerns is that they're authorizing this very large number without knowing how many are out there," Ms. Griffin said.
Sea turtles can get caught on fishing hooks or crushed by dredges, she said. Modern fishing practices kill large numbers of loggerhead turtles in the Gulf of Mexico as well as leatherbacks in the Pacific Ocean.
Ms. Griffin said leatherbacks have been on Earth since the dinosaur age, but scientists think the species could become extinct in five to 30 years.
The government has no restriction on sea-turtle casualties in most fisheries. Even where limits do exist, the NMFS does not enforce them, the report said.
NMFS fishery biologist Tanya Dobrzynski said the agency is taking action. She said the government works to implement devices that reduce turtle casualties, such as a gadget that allows the endangered creatures to escape from fishing nets. The NMFS has halted fishing operations in Hawaii and other regions where needed, she said.
Ms. Griffin called on the NMFS to use survey methods to tabulate sea-turtle populations. She also recommends that the agency order alternative methods or a halt to fishing when turtle casualties reach a critical number.
She warned that the species' extinction would affect the whole ocean ecosystem.
David Cottingham, chief of the division of marine mammal and sea-turtle conservation at the NMFS, said the preferred method of surveying turtles -- counting the number of nesting females -- cannot accurately measure their populations. He said scientists do not know how many sea turtles exist for every nesting female.
He also said population totals vary at different life stages. "The little guys are really vulnerable," he said. "They're 2 inches across."
Mr. Cottingham said the NMFS usually enforces limits on casualties by implementing fishing technology to protect turtles.
Species of sea turtles were listed as threatened or endangered in the 1970s, when declining numbers of nesting females indicated shrinking populations.
Add To Insider Newsclips | Click-2-Listen
advertisement
10,000 sea turtles authorized for kills
By Chrissie Thompson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 3, 2006
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) allows commercial fishermen to kill almost 10,000 sea turtles annually and injure 334,000 more, according to a report released last week by Oceana, an environmental activism organization.
The report marked the first tabulation of all government-authorized sea-turtle casualties from commercial fishing. Elizabeth Griffin, an Oceana marine wildlife scientist and the report's author, said the NMFS allows a certain number of casualties even though there is no estimate on how many endangered sea turtles remain in the wild.
"One of our biggest concerns is that they're authorizing this very large number without knowing how many are out there," Ms. Griffin said.
Sea turtles can get caught on fishing hooks or crushed by dredges, she said. Modern fishing practices kill large numbers of loggerhead turtles in the Gulf of Mexico as well as leatherbacks in the Pacific Ocean.
Ms. Griffin said leatherbacks have been on Earth since the dinosaur age, but scientists think the species could become extinct in five to 30 years.
The government has no restriction on sea-turtle casualties in most fisheries. Even where limits do exist, the NMFS does not enforce them, the report said.
NMFS fishery biologist Tanya Dobrzynski said the agency is taking action. She said the government works to implement devices that reduce turtle casualties, such as a gadget that allows the endangered creatures to escape from fishing nets. The NMFS has halted fishing operations in Hawaii and other regions where needed, she said.
Ms. Griffin called on the NMFS to use survey methods to tabulate sea-turtle populations. She also recommends that the agency order alternative methods or a halt to fishing when turtle casualties reach a critical number.
She warned that the species' extinction would affect the whole ocean ecosystem.
David Cottingham, chief of the division of marine mammal and sea-turtle conservation at the NMFS, said the preferred method of surveying turtles -- counting the number of nesting females -- cannot accurately measure their populations. He said scientists do not know how many sea turtles exist for every nesting female.
He also said population totals vary at different life stages. "The little guys are really vulnerable," he said. "They're 2 inches across."
Mr. Cottingham said the NMFS usually enforces limits on casualties by implementing fishing technology to protect turtles.
Species of sea turtles were listed as threatened or endangered in the 1970s, when declining numbers of nesting females indicated shrinking populations.
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cdiver2
Contributor
New Estimates of the Shark-Fin Trade
Janet Raloff
Immense numbers of sharks each year are slaughtered for their finsnot meat, just their fins. This harvest helps feed a growing appetite throughout Asia for a popular soup, one with snob appeal comparable to that of caviar. Indeed, a single bowl of shark-fin soup can cost $100 in a high-end Hong Kong restaurant.
BLOODY BUSINESS. In Taiwan ports, researcher Shelley Clarke sometimes encountered shark handlers slicing into whole fish for the fins that would supply the Asian soup market.
Clarke
The key ingredient of shark-fin soup is cartilage, which after hours of simmering, takes on the appearance and texture of cellophane noodles. Fleets harvest fins at sea by catching almost any variety of shark, slicing off all the animal's fins, and throwing the then-helpless fish back into the water.
This brutal practice, outlawed in U.S. waters (see Shark Finning Faces Broader Sanctions) is not regulated on the high seas or in most nations' territorial waters. Fins can command $200 a pound in Asian markets, whereas shark meat yields fishing fleets no more than one percent as much revenue per pound.
The huge arrays of fins for sale in markets throughout Asiaand occasional seizures of illegal harvests elsewherehint at the magnitude of the "finning" enterprise. However, estimates of the actual number of sharks killed for the soup market have been based upon data that were sketchy at best.
Because conservationists need to quantify the threat of finning to slow-growing shark populations, Shelley C. Clarke of the Imperial College London has spent several years infiltrating fin auctions in Hong Kong. From the data she gleaned on fin numbers, types, sizes, and source species in the market, she and her colleagues have estimated the degree to which international trade in fins is propelling potentially unsustainable harvests of these top-predator fish.
In the October Ecology Letters, Clarke's team estimates that finning claims between 26 million and 73 million sharks annually. That number doesn't even account for sharks killed for meat (SN: 4/15/00, p. 246: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000415/fob6.asp), sport, and natural medicines (SN: 3/5/05, p. 154) or as incidental by-catch of fishing boats targeting other species.
Nevertheless, the unprecedented market-based data show the range of shark ages and species being targeted, says Clarke. They also indicate which populations are most vulnerable to extinction and show that continuing observation of harvests and fin auctions is essential to understanding why shark populations have been dwindling so rapidly in recent years (SN: 6/4/05, p. 360: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050604/bob8.asp).
Counting catches
Clarke focused her analyses on fins moving through Hong Kong auctions for several reasons. Her previous studies had established that about half the shark fins sold in Asiaat least through 2001moved through Hong Kong traders. Also, although she's a U.S. citizen, Clarke is a permanent resident of Hong Kong and able to establish working relationships with traders there.
BONANZA. Although even fetal-shark fins are harvested, shopkeepers prefer to sell large fins like this one.
Clarke
One trader invited her into an auction, normally a closed, secretive affair. After going the first time, says Clarke, "I refused to take the hint that I shouldn't keep going." Ultimately, she notes, she attended 17, "until they threw me out. Then I basically had to take the hint."
Another trader, she says, "took pity on me when I mentioned that although I had been able to watch what was happening [at those auctions], I didn't know how many bags of fins and of which type were being sold." So, after she agreed to shield his identity, the trader opened up a drawer "and gave me 18 months of his auction records," Clarke says. "That was a gold mine" and turned out to be critical to the calculations behind many of her team's new estimates.
Clarke also obtained slivers of more than 700 dried fins. These samples, from fin stocks of 28 different traders, allowed her group to do genetic analyses and correlate the Chinese names for various categories of fins with specific shark species. Ya Jian, for instance, means blue sharks (Prionace glauca). Chun Chi refers to either of two types of hammerheads belonging to the Sphyrna genus. Wu Yang corresponds largely to the silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) but also to species with similar fins. And traders use the term Hai Ching when referring to any of a host of coastal species with black-tipped fins.
One cooperative trader even let Clarke borrow a bag of fins from a warehouse so that she could take measurements of the typical size and weight of fin being sold. Being trusted with the fins was a "coup," says Clarke, since a single fin could have a value of $100.
Clarke's group eventually focused on trade statistics for 11 Chinese categories of shark. These were categories containing only a small number of well-defined species.
The researchers used these assorted data and more from other scientists to calculate the harvest weights of the dried fins in the marketplace. From those numbers, the researchers estimated the sizes, weights, and ages of the animals from which the fins had been removed.
Big trade, in sometimes-small fins
Clarke's computations indicate that the soup market may claim as many as 73 million sharks each year. However, she points out, even the median of her group's range of estimates, 38 million sharks, translates into an estimated 1.7 million metric tons of dead sharks.
CHOICES, CHOICES. This vendor's stock boasts a range of fins marketed by size and type.
Clarke
That tonnage is more than four times what the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has estimated as the annual slaughter of sharks for their fins.
Clarke suspects that even her numbers are lower than the real harvest. Factors suggesting that even more sharks are killed annually:
Some fins are consumed domestically, so they're not reflected in statistics on international trade.
Some countries don't distinguish shark products in their reported statistics for fish.
A black market exists in threatened or endangered shark species.
Indeed, Clarke says that one Hong Kong fin trader recently told her, "I think the real [fin] trade is three times what you estimated."
A disturbing fact gleaned from the Hong Kong auctions, the researchers say, is that many of the fins being traded come from immature animals. Unlike most fish, sharks may take up to 20 years before they reproduce for the first time. Moreover, sharks bear few young at a timein many cases only two to fourand, typically, only every few years or so. Harvesting sharks before they've reproduced limits the chance that already depleted shark populations will recover.
"Traders will tell you that they want to catch only mature, large sharksbecause they have bigger, more valuable fins," Clarke says. However, she told Science News Online that she commonly saw fins at auction that were only an inch long.
Traders won't even pass up fins from sharks yet to be born. Clarke says that in Taiwan she witnessed pregnant hammerhead sharks being cut open and the fins sliced off the fetuses inside.
Trade tracking gets harder
The new Ecology Letters paper focuses on data for fin trading between 1996 and 2000. Since that time, tracking the trade has gotten harder, Clarke notes, because of changes in China, the granddaddy of fin markets.
BIG BITE. Fins aren't the only cartilaginous part of shark that Asian vendors sell. The fish's tooth-filled jaws also command a good price.
Clarke
Since 2001, when China entered the World Trade Organization, fin traders have increasingly dealt directly with markets on mainland China, not through Hong Kong middlemen.
The mainland not only has many more ports of entry for fins than Hong Kong does, but its record keeping for fin sales is not as detailed as Hong Kong's. China also imposes a duty on shark fins, which Hong Kong doesn't. So, Clarke notes, "right there you have a reason for them [Chinese traders] to underreport their activities."
Moreover, since 2001, China has allowed frozen shark fins to be reported as frozen shark meat. The first year that this rule was in effect, China's fin imports "suddenly fell by half and have stayed kind of flat since then," says Clarke. Yet, she argues, no one would have predicted that demand for the fins would diminish or even level off, because China's booming economy means more people than ever can afford the luxury soup.
Data on shark harvests have always been poor. What the new trends suggest, Clarke says, is that "if we're going to have any hope of managing shark populations, we're going to need far better data." In particular, she says, there is a growing need for observers on fishing boats and for more comprehensive trade figures on sharks. The observers, she says, are needed to begin collecting reliable, international data on where sharks are being caught, their size, their maturity, and their species.
There was to be photos that accompanied the story but I can not upload ?
Janet Raloff
Immense numbers of sharks each year are slaughtered for their finsnot meat, just their fins. This harvest helps feed a growing appetite throughout Asia for a popular soup, one with snob appeal comparable to that of caviar. Indeed, a single bowl of shark-fin soup can cost $100 in a high-end Hong Kong restaurant.
BLOODY BUSINESS. In Taiwan ports, researcher Shelley Clarke sometimes encountered shark handlers slicing into whole fish for the fins that would supply the Asian soup market.
Clarke
The key ingredient of shark-fin soup is cartilage, which after hours of simmering, takes on the appearance and texture of cellophane noodles. Fleets harvest fins at sea by catching almost any variety of shark, slicing off all the animal's fins, and throwing the then-helpless fish back into the water.
This brutal practice, outlawed in U.S. waters (see Shark Finning Faces Broader Sanctions) is not regulated on the high seas or in most nations' territorial waters. Fins can command $200 a pound in Asian markets, whereas shark meat yields fishing fleets no more than one percent as much revenue per pound.
The huge arrays of fins for sale in markets throughout Asiaand occasional seizures of illegal harvests elsewherehint at the magnitude of the "finning" enterprise. However, estimates of the actual number of sharks killed for the soup market have been based upon data that were sketchy at best.
Because conservationists need to quantify the threat of finning to slow-growing shark populations, Shelley C. Clarke of the Imperial College London has spent several years infiltrating fin auctions in Hong Kong. From the data she gleaned on fin numbers, types, sizes, and source species in the market, she and her colleagues have estimated the degree to which international trade in fins is propelling potentially unsustainable harvests of these top-predator fish.
In the October Ecology Letters, Clarke's team estimates that finning claims between 26 million and 73 million sharks annually. That number doesn't even account for sharks killed for meat (SN: 4/15/00, p. 246: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000415/fob6.asp), sport, and natural medicines (SN: 3/5/05, p. 154) or as incidental by-catch of fishing boats targeting other species.
Nevertheless, the unprecedented market-based data show the range of shark ages and species being targeted, says Clarke. They also indicate which populations are most vulnerable to extinction and show that continuing observation of harvests and fin auctions is essential to understanding why shark populations have been dwindling so rapidly in recent years (SN: 6/4/05, p. 360: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050604/bob8.asp).
Counting catches
Clarke focused her analyses on fins moving through Hong Kong auctions for several reasons. Her previous studies had established that about half the shark fins sold in Asiaat least through 2001moved through Hong Kong traders. Also, although she's a U.S. citizen, Clarke is a permanent resident of Hong Kong and able to establish working relationships with traders there.
BONANZA. Although even fetal-shark fins are harvested, shopkeepers prefer to sell large fins like this one.
Clarke
One trader invited her into an auction, normally a closed, secretive affair. After going the first time, says Clarke, "I refused to take the hint that I shouldn't keep going." Ultimately, she notes, she attended 17, "until they threw me out. Then I basically had to take the hint."
Another trader, she says, "took pity on me when I mentioned that although I had been able to watch what was happening [at those auctions], I didn't know how many bags of fins and of which type were being sold." So, after she agreed to shield his identity, the trader opened up a drawer "and gave me 18 months of his auction records," Clarke says. "That was a gold mine" and turned out to be critical to the calculations behind many of her team's new estimates.
Clarke also obtained slivers of more than 700 dried fins. These samples, from fin stocks of 28 different traders, allowed her group to do genetic analyses and correlate the Chinese names for various categories of fins with specific shark species. Ya Jian, for instance, means blue sharks (Prionace glauca). Chun Chi refers to either of two types of hammerheads belonging to the Sphyrna genus. Wu Yang corresponds largely to the silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) but also to species with similar fins. And traders use the term Hai Ching when referring to any of a host of coastal species with black-tipped fins.
One cooperative trader even let Clarke borrow a bag of fins from a warehouse so that she could take measurements of the typical size and weight of fin being sold. Being trusted with the fins was a "coup," says Clarke, since a single fin could have a value of $100.
Clarke's group eventually focused on trade statistics for 11 Chinese categories of shark. These were categories containing only a small number of well-defined species.
The researchers used these assorted data and more from other scientists to calculate the harvest weights of the dried fins in the marketplace. From those numbers, the researchers estimated the sizes, weights, and ages of the animals from which the fins had been removed.
Big trade, in sometimes-small fins
Clarke's computations indicate that the soup market may claim as many as 73 million sharks each year. However, she points out, even the median of her group's range of estimates, 38 million sharks, translates into an estimated 1.7 million metric tons of dead sharks.
CHOICES, CHOICES. This vendor's stock boasts a range of fins marketed by size and type.
Clarke
That tonnage is more than four times what the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has estimated as the annual slaughter of sharks for their fins.
Clarke suspects that even her numbers are lower than the real harvest. Factors suggesting that even more sharks are killed annually:
Some fins are consumed domestically, so they're not reflected in statistics on international trade.
Some countries don't distinguish shark products in their reported statistics for fish.
A black market exists in threatened or endangered shark species.
Indeed, Clarke says that one Hong Kong fin trader recently told her, "I think the real [fin] trade is three times what you estimated."
A disturbing fact gleaned from the Hong Kong auctions, the researchers say, is that many of the fins being traded come from immature animals. Unlike most fish, sharks may take up to 20 years before they reproduce for the first time. Moreover, sharks bear few young at a timein many cases only two to fourand, typically, only every few years or so. Harvesting sharks before they've reproduced limits the chance that already depleted shark populations will recover.
"Traders will tell you that they want to catch only mature, large sharksbecause they have bigger, more valuable fins," Clarke says. However, she told Science News Online that she commonly saw fins at auction that were only an inch long.
Traders won't even pass up fins from sharks yet to be born. Clarke says that in Taiwan she witnessed pregnant hammerhead sharks being cut open and the fins sliced off the fetuses inside.
Trade tracking gets harder
The new Ecology Letters paper focuses on data for fin trading between 1996 and 2000. Since that time, tracking the trade has gotten harder, Clarke notes, because of changes in China, the granddaddy of fin markets.
BIG BITE. Fins aren't the only cartilaginous part of shark that Asian vendors sell. The fish's tooth-filled jaws also command a good price.
Clarke
Since 2001, when China entered the World Trade Organization, fin traders have increasingly dealt directly with markets on mainland China, not through Hong Kong middlemen.
The mainland not only has many more ports of entry for fins than Hong Kong does, but its record keeping for fin sales is not as detailed as Hong Kong's. China also imposes a duty on shark fins, which Hong Kong doesn't. So, Clarke notes, "right there you have a reason for them [Chinese traders] to underreport their activities."
Moreover, since 2001, China has allowed frozen shark fins to be reported as frozen shark meat. The first year that this rule was in effect, China's fin imports "suddenly fell by half and have stayed kind of flat since then," says Clarke. Yet, she argues, no one would have predicted that demand for the fins would diminish or even level off, because China's booming economy means more people than ever can afford the luxury soup.
Data on shark harvests have always been poor. What the new trends suggest, Clarke says, is that "if we're going to have any hope of managing shark populations, we're going to need far better data." In particular, she says, there is a growing need for observers on fishing boats and for more comprehensive trade figures on sharks. The observers, she says, are needed to begin collecting reliable, international data on where sharks are being caught, their size, their maturity, and their species.
There was to be photos that accompanied the story but I can not upload ?
As usual, the media reports are having a bit of trouble correctly interpreting the original study. I have the original article from Science in front of me (I'm a fisheries grad student) and the issue of commercial fisheries going extinct by 2048 is not by any means the focus of the paper, nor is it a prediction. The only place in the article this is mentioned is a single sentence:
The trend the authors are talking about is an acceleration in the decline of species diversity in all the areas they examined. Please note that they say it "projects the global collapse" rather than saying it "predicts the global collapse." Nowhere in their article do they claim, nor do they offer any support for the notion that this is how things are going to be. In this case, the projection is simply playing out an equation based on catch data from 1950-2003 to see when all fish stocks would be collapsed, given absolutely no change in fishing practices or management, or other influences, if the equation is right.
The article is really about the relationship between biodiversity and the "ecosystem services" the ocean provides, such as food and water filtration. They found that areas with higher biodiversity (measured as numbers of species in various broad groups) were more productive and stable, and more likely to be able to recover from impacts like overfishing. In fact, fisheries with low diversity were more prone to collapse than high-diversity ones. It's really pretty cool stuff; they also found that developing marine reserves and fisheries closures could help recover both species diversity and fishery productivity. This, in turn, helps reestablish the ecosystem services, including tourism in the form of dive trips (which are specifically identified in figure 4).
There are some good reasons for all this laid out in the paper, but this probably isn't the place for me to summarize the whole paper, which is only four pages. The lead author, Boris Worm, is pretty good and is respected by a lot of folks. There are 13 authors total; that's not surprising given the scope of the work.
The paper is:
Worm, B., E.B. Barbier, N. Beaumont et al. 2006. Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science 314: 787-790.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/314/5800/787
This trend is of serious concern because it projects the global collapse of all taxa currently fished by the mid-21st century (based on the extrapolation of regression in Fig. 3A to 100% in the year 2048).
The trend the authors are talking about is an acceleration in the decline of species diversity in all the areas they examined. Please note that they say it "projects the global collapse" rather than saying it "predicts the global collapse." Nowhere in their article do they claim, nor do they offer any support for the notion that this is how things are going to be. In this case, the projection is simply playing out an equation based on catch data from 1950-2003 to see when all fish stocks would be collapsed, given absolutely no change in fishing practices or management, or other influences, if the equation is right.
The article is really about the relationship between biodiversity and the "ecosystem services" the ocean provides, such as food and water filtration. They found that areas with higher biodiversity (measured as numbers of species in various broad groups) were more productive and stable, and more likely to be able to recover from impacts like overfishing. In fact, fisheries with low diversity were more prone to collapse than high-diversity ones. It's really pretty cool stuff; they also found that developing marine reserves and fisheries closures could help recover both species diversity and fishery productivity. This, in turn, helps reestablish the ecosystem services, including tourism in the form of dive trips (which are specifically identified in figure 4).
There are some good reasons for all this laid out in the paper, but this probably isn't the place for me to summarize the whole paper, which is only four pages. The lead author, Boris Worm, is pretty good and is respected by a lot of folks. There are 13 authors total; that's not surprising given the scope of the work.
The paper is:
Worm, B., E.B. Barbier, N. Beaumont et al. 2006. Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science 314: 787-790.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/314/5800/787
stillhope
Contributor
Good job monkey! It's like a fresh breeze to see some clear summaries and actual citations for a change instead of so much hot air.
But to add to the hot air, the trend that concerns me is exemplified by Fish & Wildlife departments that are funded by hunting/fishing licenses for the species they are supposed to be regulating, Depts. of Natural Resources who are funded by submarine and terrestrial harvest leases of resources they are charged to protect, etc. Still, their scientists depend on donations and volunteers to get even the minimum of baseline studies done while lobbiests representing the exploiting industries pour gazillions of $$ into the legislature.
Given such an environment, it is hardly surprising that we don't have a very good idea of what's going on.
But to add to the hot air, the trend that concerns me is exemplified by Fish & Wildlife departments that are funded by hunting/fishing licenses for the species they are supposed to be regulating, Depts. of Natural Resources who are funded by submarine and terrestrial harvest leases of resources they are charged to protect, etc. Still, their scientists depend on donations and volunteers to get even the minimum of baseline studies done while lobbiests representing the exploiting industries pour gazillions of $$ into the legislature.
Given such an environment, it is hardly surprising that we don't have a very good idea of what's going on.
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