Illegal Shark Finning Still Occurring in the North Pacific

The illegal practice of shark finning continues to occur in the North Pacific. Experts say it is a key factor in dwindling shark populations.

This fall, an international task force, including Fisheries and Oceans Canada officers, set out to combat illegal fishing in international waters. They boarded 15 fishing vessels and found illegal activity that violated conservation measures on almost half of those vessels.

Finning is the practice of removing the fins from live sharks, either caught intentionally or as bycatch. The rest of the shark is discarded, but the loss of their fins prevents them from swimming properly, leading to their deaths. Globally, more than 100 million sharks die per year from fishing-related deaths, including finning. DFO officers also noted that non-compliance rates in the Pacific were much higher than that in the Atlantic.

The demand for fins comes primarily from Asian markets, namely Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, where the fins are used in traditional medicines and cuisine. Meanwhile, the largest consumers of shark meat are found in South America and Europe.

“We are advocating for a full requirement on landing sharks with the fin naturally attached.”

Dustin De Gagne, DFO fisheries officer

To combat finning, international rules in the North Pacific mandate that sharks should either be released unharmed or retained on board with the fin naturally attached. If the fin somehow become detached from the body, the fins must be reattached using wire or bagged together with the shark’s body. While the fins can also be stored separately, they must be tagged and submitted for inspection at sea or in port by officers.

Along with their international counterparts, DFO has been on a mission to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Their focus has been on long-distance fleets that do their fishing thousands of kilometres from shore, which makes it harder to regulate them and enforce rules. This illegal fishing typically occurs in the waters stretching from Canada’s national 200-nautical-mile boundary to Japan. 

As part of these efforts, Canadian, Japanese and Korean fishery officers conducted 34 surveillance flights out of Hokkaido, Japan, to visually inspecting over 400 fishing boats, covering over 50,000 nautical miles. During these flights, officers discovered these boats conducting shark finning, harvesting dolphins, and discarding plastic waste overboard.

Over the past five decades, oceanic shark and ray populations have plummeted by 71%, with over a third of these species, including rays, now facing the threat of extinction.

“We are advocating for a full requirement on landing sharks with the fin naturally attached,” said DFO fisheries officer Dustin De Gagne.

However, Canadian marine ecologists Boris Worm and Laurenne Schiller warn that stricter finning regulations do not necessarily curb shark deaths and only address the wastefulness and cruelty of finning.

Instead, they advocate for a limit on shark catches, improved enforcement, and ocean sanctuaries where sharks can be free from threats.

Schiller stressed that finning bans force harvesters to keep the whole shark, inadvertently encouraging them to continue fishing for sharks.

“They’re doing exactly what the law says, but now it means there’s additional markets they can tap into, for meat, for oil, for souvenirs, and all sorts of different things that sharks can now be used for,” she said. 

As a next step, DFO will bring the recent shark finning incidents and other violations by vessels to the attention of their flag states. Those countries are the ones responsible for enforcing the penalties.

DeGagne added that Canada will wait on the flag states to take action on their vessels. If satisfactory action is not taken, Canada has another avenue: Reaching out to the appropriate international fisheries commission to ban those vessels from fishing.

While sharks are often misunderstood, humans actually benefit greatly from healthy shark populations. As top marine predators, sharks have few natural enemies and play a critical role in maintaining the balance of the marine food chain.

In their absence, species lower on the food chain can grow unchecked, straining the populations they depend on for food.

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