The Sea

Don’t Eat Shark Fin Soup

Dont eat this illegal food.

Don’t eat shark fin soup. It harms you, the environment, and it is illegal. Shark fin soup is when you take the fins of sharks and boil them and mix it with broth and seasonings. But the shark in the soup shouldn’t be there because the shark was ripped away from its’ environment, definned, and then thrown back into the water alive, just to die, because a shark cannot breathe without it’s fin to help it swim. Shark fin soup originated in China thousands of years ago. It was huge status symbol and wealth indicator. The popularity of shark fin soup has not diminished and shark fin soup is still a status symbol and is considered to have medicinal benefits, but it has the opposite of medicinal benefits because it harms you.

You should not eat shark fin soup because it can kill you. This is because shark meat has a high mercury content because of bioaccumulation. Bioaccumulation is when there is substance in the environment and everything absorbs it, so the small animals have a little bit, but then the medium animals eat the small animals. So the medium animals have a lot more of the substance inside them. And then the big animal – or the apex predator – eats the medium and small animals, and has a lot of the substance. In the case of the ocean this substance is mercury, which is toxic. And even if you cook it, you cannot get rid of the mercury, and if you eat enough shark, you will die of mercury poisoning.

Along with harming you, shark fin soup also harms the environment. This is because massive removal of apex predators, such as sharks, will cause booms in populations which destroys the ecosystem in that area. When ecosystems get destroyed, this can mess up more than just one species because the one species eats a part of the food chain that was in balance and now the food chain is out of balance, which can spread farther than just one area.

In the U.S. the sale and purchasing of shark fins is illegal. This is a new law, though, because in 2021 on World Ocean Day, the Senate passed a ban on the selling of shark fins. It is banned almost everywhere which violates the United Nation’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Unfortunately, this is doing little to stop the trade because it is very profitable. One pound of shark fins can sell for $300 and it is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Because of changes in thinking and in more general ecological awareness and people are putting more pressure to permanently stop trade of it, the demand is shrinking. But that is a slow process, and so we will have to wait and see what happens.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/mar/10/shark-fin-soup-a-dangerous-delicacy-for-humans-and-sharks-alike

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/04/health/shark-fin-chinese-new-year-hong-kong-intl/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43225619

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2009/12/why-you-shouldnt-eat-shark-fin/32715/

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https://usa.oceana.org/our-campaigns/ending-the-shark-fin-trade/

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