Seahorses, Sharks Under Threat In Quest For Hot Sex And Soup

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday July 30, 1996

By GREG ROBERTS

The Chinese penchant for aphrodisiacs and the popularity of shark-fin soup in Asia are contributing to a serious worldwide decline in seahorse and shark populations, the Second World Fisheries Congress in Brisbane has been told.

Dr Amanda Vincent, a research scientist at Oxford University, said more than 20 million seahorses were killed annually for the medicinal trade in China, where they were believed to cure ailments ranging from impotence to heart disease.

Chinese traders were paying about $1,500 a kilogram - more than the price of silver - for seahorses, which were suffering dramatic declines in numbers around the world, she said.

Apart from the Chinese medicine market, millions of seahorses were killed and dried for curios or sold in the aquarium trade, where they fetched about $20 each in Australia, Dr Vincent said.

"They're sexy and everybody in the world loves them," she said at the congress, which is being attended by more than 900 marine experts and management officials from 61 nations.

About 70 per cent of the world's 35 species of seahorses, which are believed to have evolved about 40 million years ago, have been recorded in Australian waters.

They are among many marine species being harvested at unsustainable levels. The worldwide catch of chub mackerel declined from 3.4 million tonnes in 1978 to 1.4 million tonnes in 1993, while the catch of cape hake dropped from 1.1 million tonnes in 1972 to 120,000 tonnes in 1993.

The Australian catch of school sharks, used mainly in fish-and-chips shops, was about 950 tonnes last year - less than half the annual catch in the early 1980s.

Dr John Stevens, a principal research scientist with the CSIRO, said numbers of school sharks in Australia were less than half and as low as 20 per cent of the original populations.

He believed catch levels needed to be reduced.

The situation facing sharks in much of the rest of the world was far worse and deteriorating rapidly. Dr Stevens said a major factor in the global decline of sharks was the lucrative Asian shark-fin soup market.

Dried shark fins can fetch $130 a kilogram in Asia. "It is a massive industry which has taken off in a big way," he said.

Shark cartilage was also widely but wrongly regarded as a cure for cancer and many sharks were killed for this purpose.