After month long catching sharks in the sea the commercial anglers returned home to find that the thresher shark market had dried up, leaving fishermen scrambling to figure out what’s next. Trouble began in November, when vessels returning to Point Loma found that their recent catch of thresher sharks was no longer on the want list at Henry’s Market, and buyers were not purchasing the shark meat.
Those 32 thresher sharks would have represented about $4,500 to him, but the market gave him a half a buck a pound, put them in cold storage. Roff estimates he lost between $10,000 and $25,000 in revenue for the month of December — the amount that is usually brought in by his thresher shark catches.
Henry’s Market’s decision to pull out of the thresher shark market was lauded by environmental groups such as Iemanya Oceanica, a Mexico-based international nonprofit organization that runs an adopt-a-shark program. Iemanya president Laleh Mohajerani said that Henry’s has taken a critical step in protecting our oceans by joining the growing number of companies nationwide that are shifting to offering sustainable seafood.
The group cites the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which has stated that sharks are especially vulnerable to overfishing because they reach sexual maturity late in life and have relatively few offspring. President Barack Obama signed the Shark Conservation Act in January, designed to strengthen safeguards against finning — which the Humane Society of the United States links to the deaths of 73 million sharks a year.
