Demon Fish

by Juliet Eilperin

  But while Spanish fishermen are willing to make a few gestures toward conservation, such as reducing the size of their fleet through a buyout program and cutting back on the days the remaining vessels are at sea, Garat and his colleagues balk at the idea of landing sharks with their fins attached, or of tightening the fin-body weight ratio of shark landings to ensure that fishermen are not merely cutting off the animal’s fins before tossing it overboard.

  “The profits will disappear. If we have to land the fins and body together, that will be the sentence of death to this fleet,” he says. “A long time ago, maybe twenty years ago, these long-liners were fishing only swordfish, and through bycatch they caught sharks. But the circumstances have changed over the last few years, and now we have a lot of vessels that are catching sharks. They are not bycatch; they are dedicated fisheries. Now they are very important to the economics of these companies.”

  While the scientific evidence is mounting that shark populations cannot sustain the sort of fishing pressure they’re now under, translating these findings into policy remains challenging. Historically, fishing interests have never recognized the virtue of restraint, and instead relied on exploiting different species in succession in order to support their trade. Despite public pressure, the Spaniards are not ready to declare defeat when it comes to shark fishing.

  Just over a year after Astudillo and I had a chance to talk, the EU published a “consultation document” aimed at finally producing an action plan for sharks. It contains many of the goals Fordham and her allies have been fighting for, including a fin-to-meat ratio of 5 percent of a shark’s dressed weight and a call to adhere to catch limits based on scientists’ recommendations. Now that the EU has released the document—which not only needs to be approved by EU officials but also must pass muster with Europe’s Council of Ministers and its parliament—fishing interests and environmentalists are hashing out the details in front of key decision makers.

  While Sonja Fordham relocated to be in the fight, much of it takes place behind closed doors, where she can exercise little control over the outcome. “It’s so much more transparent in the U.S.,” she says. “At least you can go see the sausage being made.” In the United States, federal fisheries officials issue a public notice for a hearing and wait for anyone to show up. In Europe, policy makers hand out personal invitations.

  Fordham finds herself making pilgrimages to hostile territory in Spain and France—provided she gets an invite. “I go and make a presentation. It’s not really welcome,” she acknowledges. “They sort of start out as gentlemen …” Fordham’s voice trails off. The fact that she usually ends up being pilloried goes unsaid.

  But Fordham remains undaunted. She’s fine being seen as “the glaring American” at times, crusading for sharks. On occasion, she even passes as European, even if not as Mediterranean. “I got called a British woman the other day,” she recounts gleefully. In Fordham’s world, that’s progress. Rather than being considered a total outsider, she’s beginning to be accepted as a legitimate participant in the European debate over sharks.

  In December 2008, the EU Council of Fisheries decided to ignore most of the shark catch recommendations made by the European Commission and independent scientists. Rather than abolishing the porbeagle and spurdog shark fisheries, the ministers just reduced the catch limits by 25 and 50 percent, respectively. France, which held the EU presidency at the time of the decision, engineered the outcome, because France operates Europe’s one remaining porbeagle fishery and was unwilling to shut it down. The vote marked a serious setback for Fordham, who had thought before the negotiations began that Europe was prepared to adopt strict fishing limits for the region’s most imperiled sharks. While the ministers agreed during the same meeting to fully protect angel sharks, a species that’s been decimated in Europe, Fordham remains convinced she and her allies aren’t making progress fast enough. “It really can be too late for sharks.”

  But by April 2009, the EU Council of Fisheries appeared to be listening more closely to the concerns of Fordham and other environmentalists. It issued a document titled “Council Conclusions” endorsing a new EU Commission Shark Plan, which aims to broaden knowledge about sharks, ensure more sustainable catches, and reconcile the policies the EU espouses abroad and what it does at home. Even Spain is modifying its approach: in October 2009 it banned fishing eleven species of hammerhead and thresher sharks in its waters, making it the first EU member nation to do so. Spain doesn’t have a perfect record—its vessels continue to scour the high seas for commercially valuable sharks, and they’re still hauling illegally caught basking sharks onto land at Galicia and Asturias. But sharks’ allies are slowly making inroads in the halls of power.

  Fordham had to pack up her bags in the summer of 2009—the funding for her post disappeared when the global recession hit, and she relocated to Washington to launch a new group, Shark Advocates International. Since then, shark conservation campaigns have only attracted a higher profile. Lesley Rochat runs the Save Our Seas Shark Centre in Kalk Bay, South Africa, within walking distance of where surfers brave the bay’s shark-infested waters. Rochat, a photographer and filmmaker with a university degree in the dramatic arts, has taken an unorthodox approach to shark conservation. Sometimes it amounts to a performance art routine; other times it’s more like a Madison Avenue advertising campaign. But Rochat is focused on winning over her audience, and more often than not she succeeds.

  Rochat’s career trajectory changed one day when she was photographing an exhibit at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium, which featured a ragged-tooth shark named Maxine. Maxine had been caught in one of the shark nets that surround Durban but survived and was released, only to be caught again near Cape Town. The shark was scarred in the process, and Rochat, intrigued by the back-story, launched a fund-raising campaign that eventually got Maxine released from captivity in 2004 with a satellite tag that tracked her initial movements.

  While Maxine’s release attracted plenty of attention, Rochat decided she needed to enlist the aid of a professional ad firm in order to reach a broader audience. The Cape Town branch of Saatchi & Saatchi devised a clever set of advertisements under the banner of “Rethink the Shark,” an ironic take on the classic beach scene from Jaws. While the initial shots resemble the movie—a pleasant day at the beach that quickly devolves into a scene of panic—the scary object jutting out of the water in the end is not a shark’s fin. Instead, it’s an ordinary object that takes many more lives worldwide each year than sharks: a toaster, a kite, or a chair, depending on the commercial. It’s an effective ad, partly because the inanimate objects are so banal. As the toaster floats, seemingly harmless, the tagline reads, “Last year 791 people were killed by defective toasters. 4 by sharks.”

  Rochat didn’t stop with a single ad campaign. She’s come up with a slew of different ways to challenge popular perceptions of sharks. The shark tank in Two Oceans Aquarium now has a warning label posted on its inside stating, “Warning: Predators Beyond This Point.” The implication: humans are the predators, not the fish. In another public awareness stunt, Rochat littered a couple of South African beaches with shells that carried a recorded message from the sea, followed with messages in glass bottles from different creatures (Greg the Great White wrote, “Now I realize we have a BAD reputation because of that DAMN MOVIE, but we’re not like that”) and finally a coffin that washed ashore with a brass plate detailing the number of dolphins that drown each year in fishing nets. While Rochat’s main message is pretty grim, she does her best to leaven it with a bit of creativity. She chose to work with trained marketers because they think about how a message can infiltrate the public consciousness.

  “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 survi
vors 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

  Shark 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 l
ike 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.