The successful prosecution ultimately yielded a payoff for the region’s wildlife: authorities established a $1.5 million partnership between the federal government and private foundations in order to restore habitat for sharks and other animals living in San Francisco Bay. The shark smugglers’ $410,000 in fines, combined with a $500,000 contribution by the Unification Church and $600,000 from an environmental group and three foundations, provided the money for the fund. While the money is still in the process of being spent, it will help to restore 630 acres of tidal habitat for endangered species and 230 acres of pond habitat in an area called Eden Landing Ponds. The money will also help create a seasonal loop trail, a raised walkway, and a kayak launch, so people can visit the area and view wildlife without damaging the habitat.
A few of the smugglers’ sharks managed to make it out alive. Officials from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Chicago’s John G. Shedd Aquarium, and the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, California, all helped care for the thirty-six baby leopard sharks state and federal agents had confiscated during the course of the investigation. While seven died because they were in such poor condition when they were recaptured, aquarium officials returned twenty-five of them to the ocean and kept four of them on exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The ones kept on display have microchips implanted in them, a precautionary measure officials took in case they needed to bring them into court as evidence against the shark traffickers. Agents called the effort Operation Finding Leo.
While the sting ended in success, Fish and Wildlife’s Lisa Nichols is still fuming over the minister’s hypocrisy. During the search of Thompson’s house, agents came across large amounts of religious education materials that promoted the importance of ethics, she recalls, and the disconnect between Thompson’s preaching and his criminal activities rankled her.
“When someone’s the pastor of a church, and they consistently preach about being moral and ethical, and you have literature in your house that says you’re a good family man, you’re ethical and moral, and then you think, ‘We’re going to sell this animal to make money,’ it doesn’t matter what you use that money for. It doesn’t matter if you spend it on kids, and taking them to sea to learn about the ocean,” she says. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”
On the other hand, Nichols has spent enough time dealing with wildlife traffickers to know why leopard sharks proved to be such a big seller before federal authorities cracked down on the trade. Nichols saw the creatures in California’s fast-food restaurants and casinos, to say nothing of the pet shops that she would visit from time to time.
When it comes to the wildlife collector’s mentality, Nichols explains, “if it’s cool, and rare, and unusual, and nobody else has it, I want it. I don’t care if it’s illegal, I want it. I don’t care what it does to the animal, I want it. I don’t care if it’s bad for the environment, I want it.”
Globalization has only boosted wildlife trafficking, as electronic commerce has made it easier to connect buyers and sellers worldwide. It’s taking sharks out of the sea, one transaction at a time.
While Torres catches his suspects by chasing their colleagues down across the country and tracking their activities through secretive documents, Mahmood Shivji nails his in the confines of his lab. Shivji is a calm man with a confident air, the kind of academic who revels in getting a bunch of shark fins or frozen fish from a restaurant thrown on his laboratory table and telling you exactly which species they represent and why it matters. An Indian raised in Kenya, Shivji now makes his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he directs the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University. Nova Southeastern is, in many ways, America’s school of the future. Founded in 1964, it now ranks as the largest independent institution of higher learning not only in Florida but in the entire Southeast. The school took off in the 1980s when its leaders decided to seize upon emerging computer technology and make online and distance learning a central part of its mission. It now has more than twenty-six thousand students, many of whom spend much of their time learning online.
As part of the school’s transformation, university officials decided in 2005 to jettison their traditional mascot, the Knight (as in shining armor), for the Shark. For a school that lacked a distinctive image for decades, adopting this marine mascot has given it a sense of place, as well as a connection to some of its academic pursuits. “It has been the greatest thing we’ve done,” says Nova Southeastern’s president, Ray Ferrero Jr. While that may sound like an overstatement, Ferrero is serious, given the school’s historic lack of identity. The campus’s university center has a 250-foot-high mural featuring seventeen different shark species, and students—who suggested the switch in the first place—have embraced the new standard-bearer with enthusiasm. The change suits the school, which boasts classroom outposts on the Atlantic.
While Nova Southeastern’s main campus is right in the middle of Fort Lauderdale’s suburban sprawl, Shivji’s lab is by the sea. His workplace in Dania Beach is distinctly less glamorous than the university’s newer grounds: some of his researchers work in what amounts to a converted trailer. But Shivji’s students seems unfazed by these details.
A plant geneticist by training, Shivji hadn’t planned to work on sharks at the outset of his career. Shortly after arriving at Nova Southeastern, he happened to read a story in a local newspaper that detailed how authorities had difficulty keeping track of how many quantities of different sharks were being landed in the U.S. fishery because the animals looked so similar. Imagine a pile of gray logs: that’s what sharks look like once you’ve cut off their heads, tails, and fins. Since they’re so difficult to distinguish by the time they land on the dock, government officials often have no way of determining which imperiled species might have been hooked in a given catch.
“I didn’t know anything about sharks at the time,” Shivji recalls. “I thought to myself, as a scientist, ‘That’s not a complex question if you look at the DNA.’ ” He called up Lisa Natanson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist based in Narragansett at the time, and asked whether she’d be willing to share some of her shark samples with him. Natanson complied, and Shivji’s career headed in an entirely different direction.
Shivji set about developing diagnostic, species-specific “primers”: short single-strand pieces of DNA that will bond only with DNA from specific shark species when put through a machine that makes copies of DNA using a chemical process called a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. Shivji describes it as “a diagnostic fingerprint.” He now has species-specific primers for thirty-two different kinds of sharks, which he provides to others for free.
Shivji’s work has produced scientific breakthroughs, defining new species and forcing researchers to rethink some of their basic preconceptions about sharks. Demian Chapman pursued his doctoral work under Shivji, and the two collaborated on the revolutionary paper that confirmed a virgin shark birth in the Omaha zoo. In 2002, Shivji collaborated with three other scientists to prove that skates and rays, which were long thought to have evolved from sharks, actually belong to an ancient sister lineage.
But Shivji does not devote the bulk of his time to publishing academic papers. He’s a pragmatist who’s invested in producing concrete policy outcomes, which is why he’s spent his time developing so many easy-to-use DNA tests. When law-enforcement officials are sorting through a passel of sharks that have just been unloaded on a dock, they’re hoping to get an instant answer about whether the boat has brought in illegal goods. To do that, they need a test that can deliver a verdict quickly. While he describes his original motivation for studying sharks as academic—“I was looking at this from a science perspective; we can likely solve this problem through genetics”—Shivji takes pleasure in the fact that his innovations have translated so readily to the practical. In one study, he traced scalloped hammerhead shark fins on the Hong Kong fin market all the way back to their geographic origin in the western Atlantic, where they’re class
ified as endangered.7
“It’s infrequent that academic research makes a practical impact as quickly as this has,” he observes. After all, other researchers don’t have federal agents showing up at their lab with, say, moldy suitcases a woman from Ecuador tried to smuggle in through Miami, asking them to take a look. It turned out the luggage was stuffed with dried shark fins, sea horses, and fish swim bladders. Shivji wonders what the smuggler was thinking at the time. “You look at these suitcases bulging, and they smell. How would anyone imagine they would get by customs?” he ponders. But shark fins are light, easy to pack, and not likely to break in transit, making them ideal for smuggling across borders.
Many scientists work under the assumption they have years to produce a final result, and can spend significant sums toward achieving that end, but Shivji recognizes that law-enforcement officers in the developing world face both budgetary and time pressures when they’re trying to analyze illicit goods. “In most parts of the world, they don’t have the resources to do DNA sequencing. It’s not something a resource-poor country can have their fishery managers do.”
Shivji’s analysis has already spread to developing countries. South African law-enforcement officials have asked Shivji’s lab to conduct an analysis of confiscated fins, as has a Palau-based conservation group. An intergovernmental group representing Southeast Asian countries, SEAFDEC, asked him to determine if a group of fins they nabbed included any from the three shark species protected under international law. While none of the fins they sent to the lab violated the law, the group was impressed enough to dispatch one of its experts to learn forensic techniques at Shivji’s lab in the spring of 2008.
Even law-enforcement officers in richer countries see the advantages of using rapid genetic tests to identify shark species. Before Shivji developed his form of analysis, NOAA agents would have to ship samples of confiscated shark meat packed in dry ice to the NOAA lab in Charleston, South Carolina. Often, it would take as long as a month for scientists there to conduct a test of the fatty lipids contained in the meat and make a positive identification. Shivji requires just a small section of a fin—the amount equivalent to the graphite tip of a pencil—and he and his colleagues can deliver a verdict within four hours. During peak times of operation, the lab can analyze eighty to a hundred samples in a single workday.
In the process of his experimentation, Shivji has become a shark forensics specialist, working with law-enforcement authorities and researchers alike to analyze dead sharks. And that, in turn, has led to more shark busts.
Even shriveled shark samples can yield some significant results. In 2003, officials from NOAA and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation were touring a seafood warehouse in New York City’s Navy Yard on a routine inspection concerning black sea bass caught in North Carolina. Jim Cassin, an NOAA special agent based in New York at the time, and his two colleagues noticed the warehouse had a large number of shark fins in storage, along with a fairly elaborate fin-drying operation. Then they spotted a massive fin from a basking shark—a species that is strictly controlled under international trade laws—stretching more than three feet high.
“It’s giant, there’s no denying it,” Cassin recalls. “We saw it almost immediately, but we tried not to let on we had noticed.” In addition, they saw a huge nylon sack of fins that said “porbeagle” on the outside, signaling the fins came from a legally fished shark species, with a label on the inside reading blanco, or white, in Spanish. That, the agents suspected, meant the fins came from great whites, another one of the three internationally protected shark species.
After raising the issue with the business’s owner, Marc Agger, who downplayed the matter, the agents kept the conversation light and took off. A week later they were back, with a search warrant, which enabled them to confiscate the bag and bring it to Shivji’s lab for testing. The lab determined that more than 230 pounds of the fins came from species that are prohibited from harvest, including basking and dusky sharks. The bag that first alerted authorities contained twenty-one sets of fins taken from great whites.
On August 1, 2006, the Brooklyn-based Agger Fish Corporation agreed to pay $750,000 to settle the case, a rare win in the realm of shark fin smuggling. The seafood dealer agreed not to contest that it bought shark meat and fins without a federal permit, failed to report most of those purchases to federal authorities, and possessed fins from seven shark species that are prohibited under federal law. In addition to the federal penalty, Agger Fish had to forfeit nearly a thousand pounds of dried shark fins, including the prohibited species catch worth roughly $80,000. To this day, Cassin isn’t sure whether Agger was deliberately flouting the law or just too lazy to check which species of shark fins he had stored in his warehouse. But he adds, “He was in that industry. He should have been making the effort.”
Paul Raymond, an NOAA special agent based in the Southeast who has worked with Shivji on nearly two dozen cases, calls the professor’s DNA analysis “a great asset.” Nearly a decade ago, when the United States imposed anti-shark-finning laws, Raymond went down to watch Victor Chang, a shark fin dealer in Daytona Beach, practice his trade. He brought along an ichthyologist to help him distinguish among the species that fishermen had hauled in and were offering up to Chang that day.
As Chang sorted the different fins according to their value, Raymond wondered why the dealer sitting before him seemed more capable of enforcing the law than he was. Chang knew how to distinguish among shark species because his livelihood depended on paying the right price for a given fish. Raymond, on the other hand, was suddenly saddled with the burden of making the same distinctions in order to determine if someone had violated the law—but he lacked the knowledge required to make such a judgment. Chang would deal them out like a deck of cards. “This is silky shark, this is dusky, sandbar, sandbar,” Raymond remembers. “He’d just squat down and sort them out, and write up an invoice and pay the fishermen. And I thought to myself, ‘He just did that, why can’t I? Because I’ve got these regulations to enforce.’ ” Now Shivji’s lab provides Raymond with the answers he needs.
Shivji’s students are also using their genetics knowledge to prove that shark populations are more genetically diverse than people might have thought, a finding that has serious implications for officials in charge of ensuring that species don’t go extinct. Jennifer Magnussen, for example, has developed a primer that in a single test will not only indicate if the shark in question is a sand tiger shark but also determine if that shark came from the northwest Atlantic—in which case it’s prohibited to harvest it. Another student, Christine Testerman, has found that porbeagle sharks in the Northern Hemisphere, which are in danger of being fished to extinction, are genetically distinct from those in the Southern Hemisphere. The upshot: you can’t just count on porbeagle sharks from the Southern Hemisphere repopulating the depleted sharks near the United States, because the two don’t interbreed. In the end, DNA doesn’t lie.
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Just as law-enforcement authorities have become increasingly focused on tracking illegal shark dealing, so have more academics. The Stanford University marine biologist Stephen R. Palumbi is a more flamboyant character than Shivji—the small ponytail gathered at the back of his neck pegs him as a child of the 1960s, and he belongs to a rock band called Flagella, which performs songs about achieving conservation goals, fishing out the sea, and slime. But Palumbi, who directs Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, California, is just as committed to cracking the genetic code that helps determine the path of the global shark fin trade. A few years ago, he doled out an assignment to a bunch of graduate and undergraduate students: after giving each of the students $25, he instructed them to make a day trip to San Francisco’s Chinatown and buy dried shark fins in one of the many apothecary and grocery stores there. With most of the fins costing between $250 and $500 a pound, the students could afford a fin measuring between eight and ten inches. The stores, in many ways, mirror the
ir Hong Kong and mainland China counterparts, as glass jars of grayish fins stacked next to one another on the floor compete for customers’ attention with dried ginseng and mushrooms, while delicate white feathered shark fins selling for nearly twice the price occupy a place of prestige high up on the wall.
A baby boomer with an irreverent sense of humor, Palumbi combines a geeky passion for technology with keen understanding of pop culture. It’s not enough to send his disciples out into the world to see sharks strung up to dry; he wants to film the expedition and post it on the Web, and to use their finds to help construct an elaborate DNA database. Palumbi’s Web site features “Short Attention Span Science Theater”—short video clips that bring viewers along for the ride as he and his students investigate Chinese apothecaries or test whether “Pacific red snapper” is really a fish species. It isn’t, and in fact is a made-up name that markets use to peddle an array of different, less desirable fish.
While Shivji, in Palumbi’s words, is invested in creating “a set of tools that give you an instant answer,” so to speak, Palumbi takes a little more of a long-term, ivory-tower view of things. Palumbi is working up a hundred different protocols for a hundred different species: “a discovery-based tool versus a positive test tool.” In other words, Palumbi is trying to give academic researchers a way to identify every single shark fin with laser-like precision so they can chart their evolutionary path as well as whether they’re being illegally traded; Shivji is pushing to ensure the cops can nab a wrongdoer on the spot.
Palumbi is looking to broaden the academy’s understanding of how sharks have evolved, as well as construct a detailed and comprehensive chart of what makes each shark species distinct. He has pioneered similar genetic studies on whales and has used his findings to challenge the scientific assertions of pro-whaling forces. While he’s appalled at the paucity of data concerning sharks worldwide—“We didn’t have the global database that would say, ‘This is what these fins are’ ”—he admits that what he’s doing, at the moment, amounts to an academic exercise.
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