Another year, another week spent watching the most commonly misunderstood elasmobranch species swim, feed, reproduce, and (rarely) attack humans. We are talking about Shark Week, a ratings machine that is… Read more » Continue reading →
Another year, another week spent watching the most commonly misunderstood elasmobranch species swim, feed, reproduce, and (rarely) attack humans. We are talking about Shark Week, a ratings machine that is one of the most anticipated TV programs every year. In Costa Rica, Shark Week is also known as El Clasico de Discovery en Espanol due to its popularity among cable and satellite television customers.
Shark Week also brings up an opportunity to spread awareness about the impact of the species in Costa Rica and her society. Years of Shark Week have taught us that these marine animals are apex predators at the top of the oceanic food chain and thus ecologically significant, but their economic and cultural significance should also be discussed.
The Shark Cash Machine
For more than 20 years, the Discovery Channel has learned to depend on August and its long-running Shark Week cable TV broadcast to dominate the summer ratings landscape. People love Shark Week; in 2012, the Discovery Channel captured the attention of 21.4 million viewers. The merchandising that goes along, mostly DVDs, also manages to bring in considerable profit -which is at the heart of Shark Week.
The producers of Shark Week programs know what the late French scientist and explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau found out about sharks: People, for various reasons, find them fascinating. Cousteau began photographing and filming sharks in the late 1960s, and this made him very famous and financial successful. Then came the 1975 film Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg -and that was all it took for sharks to become part of pop culture.
Shark-related film and TV productions bring a lot money, but these are not the only ventures that have milked selachian species for their potential profit-making. The prodigious lifework of Jacques Cousteau had a huge impact on the global scuba diving industry and tourism. How many people raised on Cousteau and later Shark Week went on to pay college and university tuition for careers such as Marine Biology and Oceanography?
The industries mentioned above have to a lot to do with sharks, but they don’t threaten the existence of sharks too much. When talking about sharks in Costa Rica, however, we have to add other human activities that directly affect sharks; including: Shark fishing, the shark fin poaching trade and the shark cartilage industry. These activities pose a danger to sharks and their marine ecosystems, but they only exist because, like Shark Week, they please humans in a certain way and have produced tons of cash for many people. These three business functions, however, are being watched and controlled due to their disastrous effects on shark populations in Costa Rica.
A Profitable Catch
One of the reasons behind the ratings success of Shark Week is that conservation groups and environmental protection organizations often support, and advertise during, the different shows on the Discovery Channel. This is an excellent way to raise awareness for the benefits of shark conservation -as well as the potential dangers of their extinction.
Writing for Wired, shark scientist David Shiffman explained the following about Shark Week:
From the standpoint of public science literacy and conservation awareness, there are advantages to Discovery Channels Shark Week. For one thing, it leads to increased public discussion about sharks which scientists and conservationists can use as education opportunities. And here, social media was useful; I had the opportunity to inject facts into heightened conversations via my Twitter and Facebook accounts…
In Costa Rica, unlike in Honduras and the Bahamas, shark fishing is allowed. Those countries banned shark fishing by establishing sanctuaries after being warned by conservationists that their shark populations were threatened by overfishing. Shark species are being killed at a rather fast clip around the world, but Costa Rica has managed to avoid ecological disasters due to the sheer quantities of sharks that swim in her waters.
With regard to catching sharks as sources of food, many Ticos have eaten shark without even being aware of doing so. Shark is routinely served as part of ceviche, a popular seafood cocktail recipe. Fish shops in Costa Rica sell shark as bolillo, cazon or posta, but these cuts were only labeled as shark until recently; the only thing shoppers paid attention to was bit of chewiness and a hint of ammonia-like taste which went away when cooked. To justify higher prices, fishermen started looking for young hammerhead sharks and their tender and less odoriferous meat.
The problem with catching young hammerheads is that their species is denied the opportunity to breed and thus the shark population is threatened. Sharks, in general, take longer than other species to reach sexual maturity. Last year, the MarViva Foundation called on the Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture in Costa Rica (INCOPESCA in Spanish) to demand proper labeling of shark products at fish shops and restaurants, as well as greater enforcement of shark fishing crews to ensure they don’t go after juveniles.
Sharks are often bycatch victims that get caught in the massive shrimp trawling nets along with other species. They rarely survive the trawl, and for this reason Costa Rica recently banned shrimp trawling. The nefarious shark finning trade has also been banned during the administration of President Laura Chinchilla, but enforcement remains a tricky affair; at least that is what the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society -and international fugitive- Paul Watson likes to remind everyone about.
So in Costa Rica not only is Shark Week popular, but shark-related tourism is booming. Sharks are still being caught by commercial and subsistence fishing crews under the doctrine of you caught it, you eat it. The skin of caught sharks is often exported to be crafted into shoes and wallets, and sometimes they are used by drug dealers for smuggling purposes. Shark finning is illegal, but is still being conducted by poachers and criminal crews. And guess what? Those bowls of shark fin soup are laden with neurotoxins that may accelerate Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases (could this explain the high rate of Alzheimer’s disease in China?) The shark cartilage industry in Costa Rica has also subsided significantly due to enforcement and recent findings that no, shark cartilage is not a cure for cancer.
There is one more industry, however, that depends on Costa Rica’s abundant sharks to churn massive profits.
The Business of Conservation
Whether they are interested in their catch or oppose it, people will simply not leave sharks in Costa Rica alone. The shark cash machine has potential to generate extensive profits to diverse interests, which include nature conservationists.
Writing for The Guardian, Naomi Klein recently questioned the goals of groups such as the Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the World Wildlife Fund, which manage endowments worth hundreds of millions of dollars and invest them in the stock market, often by purchasing thousands of shares of publicly traded oil companies.
Ever since Canadian naturalist John Livingston wrote The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation in 1981, a closer scrutiny has been placed on nature conservation groups and their finances. Quite a few of these groups, which bill themselves as non-profit organizations, actually manage huge amounts of money that is mostly spent on administration and salaries. In many cases, the ecosystems and species these groups seek to protect get very little benefit from the money they collect through donations and sales of merchandise.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with the protection and conservation of sharks. After all, it is estimated that about 100 million sharks are killed each year, and the sad fact is that many are simply killed rather than caught for their meat and skin. The problem is when environmental and wildlife conservation groups take money from those interested in conservation only to spend it frivolously.
For example, the finances and work of groups such as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which has an interesting history in Costa Rica, have been called into question in the pages of the Canada Free Press and also by former Sea Shepherd Pete Bethune. Commercial diving company Shark Diver has also doubted Sea Shepherd’s shark conservation efforts in the South Pacific, calling them a mindless dissipation of donor resources. Let’s not forget that Whale Wars, starring the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, is another TV ratings miracle that airs on Animal Planet, a Discovery Communications media property.
There’s also the dubious SharkSafe eco-friendly shark deterrent barrier in South Africa, which the conservation blog Shark Alley has characterized as a money-making scam since it is simply a bunch of underwater plastic that meets criteria such as:
- Research conducted by foreigners
- Big PR/marketing campaign
- The only supporting research is published in low-ranking/little known journals
- The study gained several high profile sponsors and then lost them all
- Supporting research was done by the people who own the patents
Should the shark enforcement, conservation and protection initiatives prove successful in Costa Rica, these groups would not become endangered themselves; they would simply claim credit and move on to the next species so that they can keep the flow of money from their benefactors coming.
In the end, humans will always find a way to make money from the either the exploitation or protection of sharks.