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Posted Australian Broadcasting Corporation Of all creatures great and small, none strikes fear into people's hearts quite as much as the shark. Only this week, a woman on a surf ski fought off an attacking great white in waters off Byron Bay. But it seems sharks have more to fear from us. The rapidly growing market for shark fin, particularly for use in some Asian dishes, is luring more and more fishermen into the hunt, chasing big money. In New South Wales waters alone, catches of large sharks have almost doubled in three years. Critics doubt whether this is sustainable without pushing some species closer to extinction. Darren Ward is a commercial fisherman looking for sharks in off Coffs Harbour. "[I] went into shark fishery 12 months ago, the prawn industry was getting harder with the imported prawns, priced dropped, increase of fuel costs," he said. Mr Ward is doing what his father and grandfather did, relying on the mercies of the sea for a living. But unlike his fishing forebears, what Mr Ward sets out to catch are sharks, mostly those from the whaler family. He uses a longline stretching for kilometres and laced with hundreds of hooks. "We shed approximately 300 to 400 hooks, depending what's around, if there's a few fish around," he said. Mr Ward is one of a handful of Coffs Harbour operators who have converted their boats to fish for sharks, or more particularly, for their fins. A huge appetite for shark fin mostly in Asia, but also in Australia, is making fishing for these creatures increasingly enticing. For the shark fisherman, by far and away the most lucrative part of the animal is the fin. It fetches somewhere between $40 and $110 per kilo. By contrast, a shark's body brings in between $1 and $3 per kilo, and the price is pretty much the same for the head or the tail. In spite of those prices, the fishermen deny that they are targeting sharks just for their fins. Bill Litchfield says it's the sum of those body parts that makes it financially worthwhile. © 2007 ABC. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved. |
