Demon Fish

by Juliet Eilperin

  In 2002, Chapman befriended a taxidermist in South Beach who let him know when a haul of hammerheads was coming in. In April alone Chapman counted more than forty litters that had been killed through recreational fishing: some carried as many as twenty pups each. The toll such fishing takes on a population, he says, cannot be overestimated. “By killing forty pregnant females, you’re killing eight hundred animals or more. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out it’s unsustainable to kill pregnant females of a selected species,” he says, the scorn audible in his voice. “Think if aliens started hunting humans by killing off pregnant females. It wouldn’t take long to wipe us out.”

  Chapman isn’t the only young marine biologist who has Quartiano in his sights. Neil Hammerschlag, a research assistant professor and director of the R. J. Dunlap Marine Conservation Program at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, is relentless in the attacks he has launched on Mark the Shark. Hammerschlag uses every forum he can to question the activities of recreational fishermen like Quartiano, debating him in a sportfishing magazine or crusading against him on his Web site, www.neilhammer.com. The elaborate Web site features not only a section on how recreational shark fishing is taking its toll (including a photograph of Quartiano displaying two massive dead sharks) but details about conservation efforts and Hammerschlag’s own research.

  Hammerschlag has mulled the idea of mobilizing activists to set up a picketing operation near the Marriott to lobby the weekend warriors who patronize Quartiano’s business to eschew his fishing tours, but he’s wary of giving Mark the Shark additional media exposure. “He’s trying to live up to the legend he’s trying to create for himself,” he says. “He kind of likes attention.”

  Catching sharks as a hobby is, by definition, about getting attention. As Quartiano points out, you barely have a story if you don’t have a big hulking shark dangling beside you at the end of the day. Nothing embodies this phenomenon more than shark-fishing tournaments, which are thriving up and down America’s East Coast. They have become annual summer rituals, another way beach towns can lure tourist dollars to their area.

  There’s nothing subtle about these contests: each one of them plays up the danger of sharks and the manliness of those who catch them. There’s the “Swim at Your Own Risk Mega Shark Tournament” in Pensacola, Florida; the South Florida Shark Club’s “Big Hammer Challenge,” with contestants such as “Team Vile” and “Reel Boyz”; and the “Newport Monster Shark & Tuna Tournament” in Rhode Island. Only brave and flamboyant contestants need apply, and their willingness to flout political correctness has begun to stir controversy.

  Jack Donlon spent years organizing fishing tournaments for grouper, tarpon, and other species before he hit the jackpot with his “Are You Man Enough? Shark Challenge” in 2007. He remembers how he and his business partners fretted over attracting attention for their previous ventures: “The problem we always had was, how do you make fishing for grouper exciting? How do you make fishing for tarpon exciting? When you talk about sharks, it’s exciting, then and there.”

  From Donlon’s perspective, the explanation is obvious. While Jaws helped glamorize shark fishing by making the fish a public target, it’s the perceived risks involved that make the sport popular. “It’s something that can eat you. There’s danger there. It’s different from going out deer hunting. One misstep, and it can eat you.”

  Before Hammerschlag and his allies started making a fuss, Donlon’s Fort Myers competition was thriving undisturbed. He looked down on nearby catch-and-release tournaments, where none of the sharks were taken back to shore, as boring. “They die of loneliness,” he explains. The “Are You Man Enough? Shark Challenge” had significant backing from local businesses and had expanded to encompass a street fair, boat show, and kid fishing derby by the summer of 2009. Donlon took pains to describe the contest’s “eco-outlook” on its Web site, writing, “There are laws on the books for recreational and commercial fisheries. We responsibly abide by these laws and we respect the legal decisions of anglers to keep or release their quarry in accordance with those laws … We are proud that after several years and hundreds of anglers, the tournament has had only 7 shark [sic] harvested.”

  But the contest required its participants to land their sharks if they wanted to vie for the winning title, and that drew the ire of conservationists. These large sharks were inevitably the pregnant females that had come into the area each year to give birth, just like the ones Quartiano finds in Biscayne Bay. The Shark Safe project, a group Hammerschlag helps direct, threatened to hold a rally two weeks before the June 6 and 7 contest. The unwelcome publicity prompted some local businesses to have second thoughts: for a region that’s economically dependent on tourism, highlighting the fact that sharks swim close to the shore is not a selling point.

  Then the Lee County commissioner Ray Judah weighed in, decrying the tournament’s shark-killing policy. Judah first heard about the contest from a friend who has devoted her career to saving sea turtles, and then got an irate e-mail from a marketing agent the county had hired to promote the area to German vacationers. “I got an e-mail from Vera [Sommer] saying, ‘What the hell are you thinking? Here we are trying to market our beaches for tourists, and here you are showing pictures of battered and bloody sharks!’ ” Judah mobilized his fellow commissioners, who voted unanimously to stop the tournament. While the move had no legal standing, it sent a message. At the last minute Donlon changed course and adopted a catch-and-release policy for much of the contest, awarding just $1,000 for the retrieval of one shark. He had little choice, faced with opponents he refers to as “e-mail jihadists.”

  Donlon is blunt about why he switched gears: he is no environmentalist. “The real decision came because of pressure. Not because of conservation,” he says now.

  The following year two entertainment promoters, Sean and Brooks Paxton, decided to retool the tournament. Rather than fighting with scientists and activists, they enlisted the aid of Robert Hueter, who directs Mote Marine Laboratory’s Center for Shark Research, and the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation. They opted for a more upscale, high-tech catch-and-release tournament, “The Guy Harvey Ultimate Shark Challenge,” which has won the unprecedented blessing of the U.S. Humane Society. The contest allows only fifteen teams to compete at the outset: the first weekend narrows the field to five finalists, and in the finals streaming video allows fans to watch the fishing dockside in real time. Since the public can watch the sharks hauled on board and then thrown in the water, it compensates for the fact that they won’t be able to stare at the shark carcasses that typically hang at marinas at the finale of any fishing competition. After all, shark fishing still has to be a spectator sport if it’s going to turn a profit—the question is how to make it a bloodless spectator sport. In its first year 1,660 people showed up to watch the nonlethal contest, proving sharks still have allure even if they are allowed to escape at the end of the day.

  These activists have succeeded, in part, because they sought to preserve something that helps sustain the local economy, rather than abolish it outright. “At the end of the day, the community didn’t want people going out and slaughtering sharks off their beaches, and pulling up catches and hanging up sharks,” Hammerschlag says. The community needed a little prodding, and Hammerschlag was willing to provide it. In many ways he and Chapman represent the new breed of marine biologists, who are researcher-activists. Faced with the dramatic decline of the fish they have set out to study, they have little interest in staying on the sidelines when it comes to policy debates. And while both remain focused on publishing academic work, they have consciously crafted research projects that aim to show the importance of keeping sharks around.

  For years, activists and scientists have enjoyed a sort of symbiotic relationship, in which environmental advocates took the research academics had done and used it as ammunition to lobby for policy changes. But even as this went on, many researchers took great pains to distance them
selves from the activist community, because they feared it would undermine how other academics viewed their work and could jeopardize their chances for promotion. “The word ‘activist’ is kind of taboo within the scientific community,” Hammerschlag says, adding that when it comes to many of his colleagues, “They’re kind of scared to use that word. It’s a shame … Everything’s agenda-driven anyway.” Within the last decade or two the line between these two camps has blurred, with many scientists deciding they cannot afford to stay neutral on policy questions that affect the future course of the planet.

  It’s also not limited to the United States. Even as a Ph.D. student at the University of Cape Town, Alison Kock made the news many times for her work on the great whites that swim not far from her university. Kock believes that sometimes she has a duty to publicize her data even before she’s submitted it to a peer-reviewed journal, a radical notion for a scientist who’s hoping to ascend to academic heights. “There’s a huge generational gap,” she says, pausing for a moment. “Huge. Huge.” Kock has studied under and collaborated with more senior scientists who feel differently, but she has become comfortable with the idea of bucking convention. “Given what’s happening in the marine environment, if you have information and you just put it in a scientific paper years from now, from my perspective, it’s not responsible.”

  This radicalization among conservation biologists is beginning to redefine scientific research. Not only are researchers such as Chapman, Hammerschlag, and Kock pursuing studies aimed at producing a specific policy outcome—an end to shark fishing—they are actively working to shift popular sentiment, through either the media or public protest. As federal dollars for nonmedical scientific research have shrunk, some nonprofits with a conservation agenda have stepped in to fund this sort of work. The Pew Environment Group, headquartered in Washington, D.C., not only pays for academics to research the overfishing of sharks but also publishes attractive, easy-to-read brochures summarizing the scientists’ findings and pitches these results to reporters in order to generate favorable press coverage. While these groups are invested in promoting scientific inquiry, they view it as a means to achieve a policy end. And they can find several willing partners within academia, because these researchers have seen firsthand what’s happened to their case studies. In the same way that many climate scientists have decided they have no choice but to push for limits on greenhouse gases in order to avert drastic global warming, shark researchers argue they cannot afford to remain silent while shark populations decline.

  Dalhousie University’s Boris Worm, a German who has helped drive international media coverage of ocean issues and befriended journalists across the globe, has published a number of studies that suggest sharks and other top ocean predators have declined much faster than others have thought. The evidence has been out there, he argues, but scientists were not looking for it: they were paying attention to whales, sea turtles, and other compelling marine animals.

  “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.

  4

  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

  Each 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.

  ——

  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 ag
ainst 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.1

  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.