If you’re a long-time reader of articles regarding sharks, you’ve probably heard it said multiple times: sharks are in trouble. More than one-third of the world’s shark and ray species are now facing the threat of extinction, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared last year in the latest update to its Red List of Threatened Species. And with recent research highlighting some species residing in areas exposed to high urbanization, sharks living closer to our coastlines might be most at risk and of the greatest conservation concern.

The threats don’t stop there. Research supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Pew Fellowship Program, the Roe Foundation, and the Shark Conservation Fund has found that more than 70% of shark species that end up in the global fin trade are at risk of extinction. Led by Florida International University (FIU) Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Diego Cardeñosa, a team of international scientists from the USA and Hong Kong sampled 9,820 shark fin trimmings from markets in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is the centre of the lucrative shark fin trade as one of the largest shark fin trade hubs in the world. Through DNA analyses, the team was able to determine which fins belonged to what shark species and found 86 different species. The kicker? Well, 61 of those are threatened with extinction.

“The fact that we are finding so many species threatened with extinction in the global shark fin trade is a warning sign telling us that international trade might be a main driver of unsustainable fishing,” Cardeñosa said in a press release. While the most common species that end up in the fin trade are open ocean or pelagic sharks, the greatest number of species in the trade are those that live in coastal areas like the blacktip (Carcharhinus limbatus), dusky (C. obscurus), spinner (C. brevipinna), and sandbar sharks (C. plumbeus). Published in Conservation Letters, this research is just the latest to come out of a decade-long effort to track and monitor the global shark fin trade. Dr. Demian Chapman, FIU adjunct professor and Director of Sharks and Rays conservation…