Elsevier

Marine Policy

Volume 85, November 2017, Pages 138-140
Marine Policy

A United States shark fin ban would undermine sustainable shark fisheries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2017.08.026Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The United States has some of the most sustainable shark fisheries on Earth.

  • The United States is considering a nationwide ban on the sale of shark fins.

  • Such an effort would harm ongoing conservation efforts.

Abstract

A proposed nationwide ban on the sale of shark fins within the United States would undermine sustainable shark fisheries, would have little effect on global shark mortality, and would perpetuate the misconception that the shark fin trade is the only threat facing sharks. Instead, placing a priority on policies focusing on sustainable shark fisheries management is preferred for meeting the goals of shark conservation.

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the following experts who provided helpful feedback on this manuscript: Sonja Fordham of Shark Advocates International, Russell Hudson of Directed Sustainable Fisheries Inc., Dr. Jenny McCune, Dr. Sally Otto, Riley Pollom, Dr. Jeremy Pittman, and Dr. Colin Simpfendorfer. We would also like to thank two anonymous referees whose suggested changes helped to improve this manuscript.

References (16)

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    Based on media coverage, readers may wrongly believe shark finning is the only major threat that sharks face and that the shark meat trade and overfishing in general are not significant threats. This is problematic because policy solutions focusing on only the shark fin trade allow other threats to proceed without the policy interventions that can come from public awareness and pressure (as argued in Shiffman and Hueter, 2017, although other policy tools are still actively discussed by decision makers, they often generate much less public pressure). Furthermore, readers would wrongly believe that shark declines are more severe and pervasive than they really are (see Burgess et al., 2005 for a discussion on why that is not the case and Peterson et al., 2017 for population increases) and would wrongly believe that the ecological consequences of shark population declines are worse than they really are (see Grubbs et al., 2016 for a detailed discussion about the lack of evidence of shark population declines causing trophic cascades).

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