Fish Food 4 Thought

     In 2021, Sea Shepherd conducted a successful campaign to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. This so-called "IUU" fishing comprises 15 to 40 percent of all fishing activity on Earth. In their first partnership with the nation of Perú, Sea Shepherd, using its vessel Ocean Warrior , arrested six ships for IUU fishing in a matter of just a few weeks.      An even more consequential part of this campaign was exposing the massive Chinese fleet just outside the Galápagos Marine Reserve. Sea Shepherd documented vessels with histories of labor abuses using crew that had not set foot on land or heard any news from the outside world in nearly two years, with one Chinese fisherman even asking if the COVID-19 pandemic, which had been in the United States for nearly 18 months and killed hundreds of thousands of people at that point, had made it to the United States yet. These vessels flipped off their AIS information...

     2022 is already shaping up to be a historic year for shark conservation. 2021 was an important year, for sure: nations pledged to protect the majority of the most important shark habitat on Earth, and the U.K. joined Canada in banning the shark fin trade. However, 2022 has started off with a bang.      At the beginning of the year, 450,000 people had signed onto the European Citizens' Initiative urging the European Union to ban the shark fin trade. The European Union is relatively behind on shark conservation. They did ban the practice of shark finning in 2013 (13 years after the United States), but they have yet to ban the trade in shark fins.      There's a persistent myth that China is the sole destination for shark fins in the world, and for a long time, that was mostly true. However, China banned the consumption of shark fin soup, a tasteless chicken- or fish-broth-based soup used to display one's wealth, at public functions years a...