Becoming a fan of the ongoing shark conservation and industry blogging going on over at Beqa Adventure Divers is as easy as clicking a link. Remaining a fan is as easy as reading this weeks post about shark finning.Coherent Op-Eds are hard to find in our industry, fortunately for the rest of us there's the BAD Blog who took a smart conversation going on over at Southern Fried Science and jumped all over it:
If this is true, many of us got to seriously re-think our approach to Shark Conservation.
It says that many fisheries, Shark fishing included, are completely supply limited.
In a nutshell, it would mean that the demand for Shark fins greatly outweighs the supply and that consequently, even if we managed to convince a lot of people not to consume Shark fins, it would have little to no effect on the market and thus, on the supply side represented by the size of the Shark fishing industry.
Couple that with the fact that price elasticity for Shark Fins is probably very close to zero (meaning that prices will rise as stocks get depleted, always balancing, or even outpacing the rising cost of having to find increasingly rare Sharks in an increasingly empty Ocean) and that fishermen are perfect examples for the Tragedy of the Commons, and we are faced with a problem of truly epic proportions.
Complete Post
1 comment:
Thank you, appreciate!
Dunno how it is with you guys - but this end, those posts kinda take on a life of their own, and I found myself advocating solutions that I don't like one bit.
But emotions are emotions, and rational thinking is rational thinking. Very difficult to reconcile, especially in Conservation.
Alas!
Guess that having been so vocal about dogmatism and the resulting fiasco in Whale conservation, I had it coming!
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