World's largest shark sanctuary around Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands (Wikipedia) are a remote country in the middle of the South Pacific, comprising a collection of islands and atolls and having a population of less than seventy thousand people. It's clear from the map below that its territory is mostly ocean.

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That's what makes the recent announcement all the more significant. All 1,990,530 sq. km of its territorial waters will now become the world's largest shark sanctuary. This comes after the country enacted a moratorium on the shark trade in March of this year. According to the Pew Environment Group:

Key provisions of the comprehensive Marshall Islands' law include: 

• A complete prohibition on the commercial fishing of sharks as well as the sale of any sharks or shark products. Its zero retention stipulation requires that any shark caught accidentally by fishing vessels must be set free.
• Large monetary fines, anywhere between US$25,000 to US$200,000, for anyone who is found to be fishing sharks or in possession of shark fins. In addition, violators would be fined the market value of the product in their possession.
• A ban on the use of wire leaders, a longline fishing gear which is among the most lethal to sharks.
• A monitoring and enforcement provision which requires all fishing vessels to land their catch at one of the country's ports and bans at sea transfers.

Read more at the Pew Environment website. Via Science and National Geographic.

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In related news from last month, Yao Ming, the famous Chinese basketball star, endorsed a renewed campaign against shark's fin soup in China (BBC News). This campaign is run by WildAid, an environmental NGO (press release). He's been associated with WildAid for at least the past five years (NY Times). As China becomes more affluent, demand for shark's fin is rising, but this raised awareness will hopefully help to counteract that.

Poster of Yao Ming by WildAid. From Bush Warriors blog

An indication of how things could be going is in Hong Kong, where recent surveys have shown that attitudes towards serving and consuming shark's fin are changing. The Malaysian newspaper The Star has recently published a good article on the shark trade, including perspectives from those who are in the shark-processing industry.

Eat Invasive Species

Pacific lionfish are invading the Atlantic and Caribbean, feeding on clueless prey and being shunned by predators because of their distasteful spines. So far, efforts to control them are limited to manual removal by divers. However, according to the report, "[a]t least one US company is already trying to market lionfish to restaurants as a gourmet dish."

From a free-market economist's perspective, that's probably the best way to control invasive species: create a market for them. With 6.7 billion people on the Earth, consumer demand is a powerful force. High consumption is responsible for environmental harm, so why not harness it for a useful purpose?

Take the Northern Snakehead, for example. A native of Asia, it was released into waterways in North America and is now preying upon native fishes, wiping them out from lakes and rivers. They were brought into the US because there was demand for them in Chinatown fish markets. Other Americans, however, won't eat them. And why not, indeed? Man is the most voracious predator on the planet (Woman trails closely behind). What matters is how that hunger is directed. Aspiring environmentalists, please take note.

Lake Victoria Cichlids Coming Back...

The cichlid fishes of Lake Victoria in East Africa, the 2nd largest freshwater lake in the world, are famous for their diversity. They are a textbook example of adaptive radiation, that almost every student of evolution will have heard about. What they will also learn about, however, is that the cichlids are en route to extinction and depletion, because of the Nile Perch, a predatory fish introduced to the Lake in the 1960s for food and sport. In combination with eutrophication and pollution, cichlid populations and diversity declined considerably in the following decades.

Now, however, the populations may be recovering, according to scientists studying the lake. Part of the explanation lies in the heavy fishing pressure on the Nile Perch, and on improvements to the quality of water running into the lake, but the adaptive potential of the cichlid to changing conditions may have some role to play. Much of the research has been conducted by Ole Seehausen of Eawag Aquatic Research in Switzerland. His research had previously found that the increased turbidity of the lake impaired the ability of female fishes to discriminate the colors of their prospective mates, reducing the effectiveness of sexual selection and allowing more hybridization between previously reproductively-isolated species. As a result, the cichlid species in the lake today are of a very different composition and genetic makeup than those found before human modification of the lake environment.

Tuna ban sunk!

Dar she blows! - "U.N. Rejects Export Ban on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna," by David Jolly & John M. Broder. The New York Times, 18 Mar 2010 - link.

Despite winning over EU and the US and overwhelming scientific info, the proposed Appendix I listing for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (ABT) was torpedoed by Japan's active lobbying. Many developing countries was swayed by fear-mongering that their own tuna fishery would be affected directly or in the future.

In the end, really, there was simply too much money involved. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the regional fishery body managing the ABT, has been strongly criticised for failing to do its job, and ABT stocks has plummeted by about 70% since 1950. Conservation NGOs had whimsically referred to ICCAT as the "International Conspiracy to Fish All Tunas"...

This big fight at CITES foreshadows another show-down at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) annual meeting in November this year between Japan and the anti-whaling lobby...

See "Why Japan Keeps Fighting the Whale Wars," by Bryan Walsh. Time, 13 Mar 2010 - link.