A hammerhead shark lower than one meter lengthy swims frantically in a plastic container aboard a ship within the Sanquianga Nationwide Pure Park, off Colombia’s Pacific coast. It’s a delicate feminine Sphyrna corona, the world’s smallest hammerhead species, and goes by the native title cornuda amarilla—yellow hammerhead—due to the colour of its fins and the perimeters of its splendid curved head, which is stuffed with sensors to understand the motion of its prey.
Marine biologist Diego Cardeñosa of Florida Worldwide College, together with native fishermen, has simply captured the shark and implanted it with an acoustic marker earlier than rapidly returning it to the murky waters. A sequence of receivers will assist to trace its actions for a yr, to map the coordinates of its habitat—precious info for its safety.
That hammerhead is much from the one shark species that retains the Colombian biologist busy. Cardeñosa’s mission is to construct scientific information to help shark conservation, both by finding the areas the place the creatures reside or by figuring out, with genetic exams, the species which might be traded on the planet’s essential shark markets.
Sharks are below risk for a number of causes. The demand for his or her fins to produce the primarily Asian market (see field) is a really profitable enterprise: Between 2012 and 2019, it generated $1.5 billion. This, plus their inclusion in bycatch—fish caught unintentionally within the fishing business—in addition to the rising marketplace for shark meat, results in the dying of tens of millions yearly. In 2019 alone the estimated whole killed was at the least 80 million sharks, 25 million of which had been endangered species. In truth, within the Hong Kong market alone, a significant buying and selling spot for shark fins, two-thirds of the shark species offered there are vulnerable to extinction, in response to a 2022 examine led by Cardeñosa and molecular ecologist Demian Chapman, director of the shark and ray conservation program at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida.
Sharks proceed to face an advanced future regardless of many years of laws designed to guard them. In 2000, the US Congress handed the Shark Finning Prohibition Act, and in 2011 the Shark Conservation Act. These legal guidelines require that sharks introduced ashore by fishermen have all their fins naturally connected and intention to finish the apply of stripping the creatures of their fins and returning them, mutilated, to the water to die on the seafloor. Ninety-four different international locations have applied comparable laws.
Maybe the principle political and diplomatic device for shark conservation is within the arms of the Conference on Worldwide Commerce in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), composed of 183 member international locations plus the European Union. The treaty presents three levels of safety, or appendices, to greater than 40,000 species of animals and vegetation, imposing prohibitions and restrictions on their commerce in response to their risk standing.
Sharks had been included in CITES Appendix II—which incorporates species that aren’t endangered however might turn out to be so if commerce shouldn’t be managed—in February 2003, with the addition of two species: the basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) and the whale shark (Rhincodon typus). Following that, the checklist of protected species grew to 12 after which elevated considerably in November 2023 with the inclusion of 60 extra species of sharks in CITES Appendix II.
However do these instruments truly defend sharks? To hunt out solutions, over the previous decade researchers have labored to develop exams that may simply establish which species of sharks are being traded—and decide whether or not protected species proceed to be exploited. They’ve additionally targeted on learning shark populations around the globe so as to present info for the institution of protected areas that may assist safeguard these animals.
