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godzilla 25 October 2006 Endangered & Extinction, General 256 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

National Geographic
The United Nations has estimated that only about ten million sharks are harvested each year. Some conservationists, however, put the number at closer to a hundred million.

But until now estimates of the shark harvest were little more than guesses, because the numbers depended on shark fishers to report their catches.

The shark-fin industry, concentrated in a few Asian trading centers, is secretive and wary of any attempts to regulate, or even investigate, its practices.

To make matters murkier, most fisheries-management groups give little attention to sharks, because they are often considered bycatch—fish caught by accident—given their low value per pound.

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In their effort to accurately estimate the number of fins harvested—and therefore the number of sharks killed—the scientists conducted interviews with traders and studied almost 400 fin samples.

In the end the researchers concluded that from 1996 to 2000 26 to 73 million sharks were traded yearly. The annual median for the period was 38 million—nearly four times the UN estimates but considerably lower than those of many conservationists.

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