Shark Conservation Act

The Shark Conservation Act of 2009 would strengthen the U.S. ban on shark finning by closing enforcement loopholes and encouraging other countries to adopt similar bans and shark conservation programs. The bill, S. 850, introduced by Senator John Kerry (D-MA), is the companion bill to H.R. 81, which was introduced by Representative Madeleine Bordallo (D-GU) and approved by the House of Representatives in March.

Shark finning is the practice by which living sharks’ fins are sliced off and their mutilated bodies thrown back into the ocean, where the sharks endure long, painful deaths. Shark finning kills an estimated 73 million sharks each year, driven by the demand for shark fin soup.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the Shark Finning Prohibition Act, making it unlawful to possess a shark fin in U.S. waters without a corresponding carcass. Unfortunately, enforcement has been hampered by loopholes in the ban, and finning has continued. Even the fins from threatened species – including the basking, porbeagle, dogfish, gulper and hammerhead sharks – are being marketed. Since sharks are top predators, their decimation creates a ripple effect throughout the marine food web, impairing the balance of the ocean ecosystem. Sharks are particularly vulnerable, because they produce few young and reach sexual maturity late in life.

The current law permits fisherman to remove shark fins at sea, providing that the total weight of the fins do not exceed five percent of the total weight of the bodies. This allows fisherman to shirk the law and illegally mix and match fins and carcasses of different species to maximize their profit.

The Shark Conservation Act of 2009 strengthens the original ban by requiring that sharks be landed with their fins naturally attached to their bodies and prohibits the transfer of fins at sea. Enforcement officials have stated that this requirement is the only way to uphold a shark finning ban. Landing sharks with their fins attached also allows for better species-specific data collection, which is extremely vital, since it is estimated that overfishing has depleted the world’s shark populations by 80 percent, with some species being so data deficient that their status is unknown.