ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-SRI LANKA: Shark Trade Puts Sri Lanka in a Spot

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Aug 29 1998 (IPS) - Sri Lanka is ikely to join a growing international move to include sharks on a list of protected fish species, but would find it harder to prevent a lucrative trade in shark fishing.

The Indian Ocean island’s annual shark production of 8,000 to 9,000 tonnes is just about six percent of the country’s total fish output.

But in terms of the annual shark catch of 11,000 to 13,000 tonnes in the entire Bay of Bengal region, Sri Lanka makes up for more than half that total.

“We are the biggest producers of shark in the Bay of Bengal and probably in Asia,” said Devapriya Amarasuriya, a research officer at Sri Lanka’s state-run National Aquatic and Research Agency (NARA).

But largely as a result of the relentless slaughter, the populations of some shark species have plummeted by an estimated 80 percent over the past decade. At the current rate of exploitation, researchers predict that “some species will reach ecological extinction within 10 years”.

International efforts are underway to protect the shark, not least through the declaration by the United Nations of 1998 as the Year of the Ocean and through moves to put the shark on a list o endangered species.

At a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Zimbabwe last year, suggestions were made for the proper management of shark fishing to ensure that international trade does not kill off shark populations.

But the campaign puts Sri Lanka in a tough spot. While the country supports efforts to protect the shark and is most likely to follow the CITES recommendations, the shark is also a popular dish, an important source of fish protein as well as useful for other traditional reasons.

This would make it hard for Sri Lanka to actually implement the recommendations of CITES or similar measures, scientific experts say.

Conservationists say bans in Sri Lanka have been ineffective when a particular section of the population is involved in the activity to be restricted. Often, they put pressure on local politicians to resist such bans, saying they would affect incomes and survival.

“Bans in the past have proved ineffective because politicians, in an attempt to protect their vote bank, resist or restrain such attempts,” one conservationist here noted.

Amarasuriya, probably the only Sri Lankan conservationist involved in long-term research on sharks, says that most of the sharks caught in Sri Lankan waters are baby ones.

This puts the reproduction of sharks in even greaterdanger, because they do not reproduce as much as other fish varieties.

Unlike traditional food fish like cod and tuna which grow quickly and lay millions of eggs at a time, sharks can take two decades to reach sexual maturity, have a long gestation period and bear only a few young at one time.

Thus, killing a relatively small number of females can dramatically limit the reproductive potential of an entire species, scientists point out.

Sri Lanka has about 46 varieties of shark out of more than 350 different shark species in the world, but there are no figures about the shark population in local waters. More than 75 percent of Sri Lanka’s total shark catch is represented by the species called ‘silky shark’.

Shark consumption is popular in Sri Lanka unlike the rest of the Bay of Bengal countries, where the smell of urine in the flesh puts off many consumers. Sharks retain their urine in the tissues, blood and muscles to maintain osmotic pressure.

Shark flesh is also in demand here due to a belief that it helps generate extra blood cells in the human body, helps pregnant and feeding mothers and generally improves one’s health. Dried shark fish is a delicacy.

For Sri Lankan fishermen, sharks are a more profitable catch than tuna because their meat and fins sell well. Each fully grown, large variety of shark can fetch around 45,000 rupees (700 U.S. dollars).

Shark’s fin soup is an expensive delicacy in Japanese restaurants, fetching up to 50 dollars per bowl. The export of shark fins from Sri Lanka to Japan, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan among other countries is a profitable venture.

Apart from its taste and protein content, shark’s fin soup is also considered an aphrodisiac and generally thought to improve one’s sexual prowess.

In the late sixties, fishermen used to see sharks as getting in the way of their catches of tuna — and their income. They then began using existing longline gear to increase the efficiency of tuna fishing and reduce shark catch.

During this period, hooked sharks were discarded at sea and, at a later stage, the liver and fins taken and the carcasses discarded. But the situation has changed in the past two decades as sharks have become a target variety because of market demand, Amarasuriya explains.