Tragedy in the Gulf

Today sharks are in jeopardy worldwide. More than one third of all shark species are at risk of extinction, largely due to overfishing. Sharks are exploited for their fins and by-products. There is significant bycatch and waste in this process.

Sadly, this is not a new story.

Twenty years ago I spent many months in the Gulf of California documenting shark fishing and fisheries overexploitation. What I found there was a story about sharks but also a human story. A complex one. Local subsistence fishermen faced intense resource competition from southern Mexican fisherman imported by Taiwan and Chinese exporters that sought only shark fins for the Asian shark fin soup market. Large groups of these “foreign” fishermen would set miles-long long-lines every evening up and down the Gulf of California, sometimes baited with sea lions illegally harvested for this purpose. The fishermen would return every morning to temporary processing camps where the fins were removed and dried. The water ran red in these bays. The fins were then transferred to transport ships offshore on the way to large trans-shipment ports such as Ensenada.

Ostensibly this was entirely legal. The foreign fisherman (fronted by the Taiwanese and Chinese firms) had permits secured from Mexican officials to exploit these waters. Meanwhile, the local fishermen of the Gulf of California saw their subsistence fishing catches from their home waters decline and were powerless to address it.

These photographs share that story. This work was published around the world in popular magazines and was shared with opinion leaders at environmental and policy conferences in Mexico and Latin America. 

The exploitation of sharks continues.  

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