Ningaloo Attraction Still On The Menu

June 20, 2007

Release from: Tiffany Laurie
thewest.com.au (Australia)

It is a scene which appears to confirm scientists’ worst fears about the fate of whale sharks, one of WA’s best known tourist attractions. The three-tonne, 6m shark lies on the back of a truck at a dock in Taizhou, east of China’s Zhejiang province, being poked and prodded after it was caught by local fishermen.

The shark was reportedly sold for almost $4000 and will most likely end up being sold in restaurants and markets for about $8kg as “tofu meat” — a delicacy made from the soft, white flesh of the gentle giant. Its massive fins are sought after for shark fin soup, or else the fins are dried whole and used as advertising billboards outside fish markets.

Oil from the shark’s liver is also traditionally used to seal the hulls of fishing boats.

The shark’s fate throws into stark terms recent research that suggests the giant fish are disappearing and fingers are pointing at Australia’s northern neighbours.

Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) and Charles Darwin University researchers studying 12 years of photographs from Ningaloo Reef in an attempt to predict population size discovered a steady decline in whale shark numbers, particularly in the bigger sharks which tended to be more vulnerable to exploitation.

Report co-authors Dr Corey Bradshaw and Dr Mark Meekan said although international pressure had seen many countries — including India, the Philippines, Maldives and Taiwan — ban whale shark fishing, there continued to be a robust black market for the fish’s meat and oil.

In 2001, Taiwan caught about 100 whale sharks, down from 270 in 1999. The Taiwanese Government announced last month it would ban the harvest and sale of whale sharks next year.

Dr Meekan, who is part of a joint AIMS and CSIRO program which tags and electronically tracks whale sharks, said it was important the Australian Government worked with countries such as Indonesia to promote ecotourism and help stem the predation of the endangered species.

Many Ningaloo whale sharks migrated past Indonesia, Bali and Sri Lanka but it was difficult to determine the shark’s fate because the tags either fell off naturally or were removed by fishermen.

Last year, the sophisticated tracking data showed one tagged whale shark was swimming and diving normally at 9.30am, but half an hour later the tag’s signal was coming from a beach near an Indonesian fishing village. “It could be the tag fell off and was taken to the beach, or the animal and tag were both taken to the beach, but it makes us highly suspicious that whale sharks are being caught in Indonesia,” Dr Meekan said.

He said it was not illegal for Indonesian fishermen to catch the rare sharks, but Australia should put diplomatic pressure on the country’s Government to educate villagers and give them incentives to protect it.

“A ban would be useless because it is not a large commercial fishery in these places, it is individual fishermen and villages being opportunistic,” Dr Meekan said.

“We have to work on governments but also work at the ground level and getting to the villages and giving them options so they realise these fish can be worth more alive than carved into slices and sold for a few dollars a kilo.”

Ningaloo’s whale shark ecotourism industry is worth about $12 million a year to WA.

Greens Senator Rachel Siewert said the Federal Government needed to step up efforts to establish a regional fisheries management plan with Australia’s northern neighbours that would include economic incentives and education programs for villagers.

She said countries like the Philippines, whose fishermen used dynamite on coral reefs to catch fish, should not be held up as good examples of the way fishing villages could be encouraged to manage their traditional fishing zones in a sustainable way. Fishermen who continued to catch the giant fish needed to be authorised by their governments.

A spokesman for Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull said whale sharks were not known to be specifically targeted in northern Australian waters but the long migrations of the sharks meant local action to protect them had to be complemented by international initiatives.

The Federal Government had invested more than $1 million under the Natural Heritage Trust to shark conservation projects, including studying the numbers, migration and behaviour of whale sharks in Australian and neighbouring waters.

But the species remains shrouded in mystery despite the increased research and the annual migration of up to 500 whale sharks past Ningaloo. Before the mid-1980s, there were only 350 confirmed reports of whale sharks worldwide and the species was listed as nationally threatened under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity and Conservation Act.