Demon Fish (18 page)

Oceana—the environmental group, not the shark-peddling firm—is the sort of organization that specializes in launching public advocacy campaigns with a specific policy goal: in one of their most successful campaigns, they embarrassed several major cruise lines into treating their sewage rather than dumping it, untreated, into the open ocean. Their lobbying is aimed mainly at influencing the public’s perception of a given company: in the case of squalene, they wrote a series of open letters suggesting that major cosmetic companies should be ashamed of using the product. “Although companies are selling deep-sea shark products as ‘pure’ and ‘natural’ and ‘wild’—all great marketing words—what they’re doing is the same as peddling endangered rhinoceros horn or elephant ivory,” Hirshfield says, scoffing.

Within a matter of months, the companies backed down in the face of the activists’ campaign and jettisoned squalene. It wasn’t too hard a sell: botanical sources such as rice bran, wheat germ, amaranth seeds, and olives can also yield squalene, and the fact that deepwater sharks are considered among the most vulnerable sharks around made the practice particularly distasteful. By January 2008 the Vermont Country Store took BioMarine Topical Deep Water Squalane off its shelves, and Unilever, the London-based manufacturer that produces Pond’s and Dove, announced it would use a plant-based version of squalene instead. And exactly a year later Dr. Susan Lark, a major supplier of squalene-based cosmetic products, agreed to stop using the ingredient after receiving complaints from fifteen thousand members of the environmental group Oceana.

In this age of corporate responsibility, after all, some beauty manufacturers don’t want to be responsible for driving a species to the brink of extinction. “Unilever is committed to running its business on a sustainable basis and we have a policy of not using products from species that are either in danger or in decline,” wrote Gavin Neath, Unilever’s senior vice president for global corporate responsibility, to the executive director for Oceana Europe, Xavier Pastor, in a December 10, 2007, letter. “As such I can confirm we have identified, and started to take steps to remove from our products, any squalene with animal origins and will replace it with plant based versions (including the Pond’s brand that you mention in your letter).” That allowed Oceana—the ocean advocacy group—to declare victory.

The PR battle over squalene represents just the latest debate over claims that shark products can stave off aging and disease. For years, health-food stores have touted shark cartilage as a way to halt cancer, selling it in the form of powder-containing pills. The theory behind the product is that shark cartilage contains a substance that inhibits the growth of blood vessels—angiogenesis—that help tumors expand: if the vessels stop developing, so will the tumors. These products actually stem from what had been legitimate scientific research in the 1970s, when Judah Folkman, chief of surgery at Children’s Hospital Boston, conducted tests using animal cartilage to see if it had angiogenic properties. The initial research—on rabbits—was promising, and studies later conducted by a former student of Folkman’s and a new collaborator raised the possibility of inhibiting tumors by implanting shark cartilage pellets. While some studies of angiogenesis continue to this day, scientists were unable to reproduce these results with humans, so credible researchers gave up on the idea of using shark cartilage to cure cancer.

Still, a biochemist named I. William Lane seized upon these findings and co-authored a book in 1992 titled
Sharks Don’t Get Cancer: How Shark Cartilage Could Save Your Life
. Lane got a major shot of publicity in 1993 from a segment by the newsmagazine
60 Minutes;
in 1996 he received a patent to market shark cartilage pills and co-wrote a second book titled
Sharks Still Don’t Get Cancer
. Later, he founded a company called LaneLabs USA, headed by his son Andrew, and started selling a product called BeneFin that he claimed would help fight cancer.

In September 1997 the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to LaneLabs stating that BeneFin—along with two of the company’s other products that claimed to treat skin cancer and AIDS—violated the law because LaneLabs was marketing it as a drug rather than as a dietary supplement. When the company ignored the letter, FDA officials sued in 1999 to halt the sale of BeneFin and the two other products altogether.

It took five years, but on July 13, 2004, William G. Bassler, a federal judge in New Jersey, ruled the products amounted to unapproved new drugs. He issued a permanent injunction against their sale and ordered LaneLabs to pay restitution to anyone who purchased BeneFin and the two other supposed cures since September 22, 1999. The FDA’s acting commissioner at the time, Lester M. Crawford, welcomed the decision, saying it sent “a strong signal that the promotion and sale of unapproved drug products, especially for the treatment of cancer and other serious diseases, will not be tolerated.”

Since that legal decision, most of the American medical establishment has done its best to debunk shark cartilage treatments as a cancer cure-all. The National Cancer Institute reviewed the findings from the experiment trial Lane and his colleagues conducted in Cuba and called them “incomplete and unimpressive.” Gary Ostrander, a research dean at Johns Hopkins University, investigated the claim that sharks are immune to cancer by sifting through the National Cancer Institute’s Registry of Tumors in Lower Animals and found forty instances where sharks and their closest relatives, skates and rays, experienced benign and malignant tumors.
¹¹
Lane concedes this point in his second book, though he dismisses it as immaterial, writing, “While
ALMOST No Sharks Get Cancer
might have been a bit more accurate, it would have been a rotten title.”

In the most telling rebuke, the Mayo Clinic oncologist Charles L. Loprinzi and scientists in the North Central Cancer Treatment Group designed and conducted a rigorous test of whether shark cartilage improves the health of patients with breast and colorectal cancer. The study—a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial—showed the patients taking shark cartilage enjoyed neither an improvement in their condition nor a significant boost in their quality of life. In some cases, the patients taking the pills saw their quality of life deteriorate. The authors wrote in the July 1, 2005, issue of
Cancer
, the American Cancer Society’s peer-reviewed journal, “Shark cartilage did not demonstrate any efficacy in patients with advanced breast or colorectal cancers.”

While sharks possess a range of fascinating properties, they cannot stave off human mortality or aging. To suggest otherwise merely perpetuates the sorts of myths that have surrounded this fish for centuries.

Some U.S. fishermen used to make careers out of satisfying Americans’ demand for shark, but the market they used to cater to has virtually disappeared. No career better exemplifies this arc than that of Eric Sander, a Daytona Beach, Florida, fisherman who has been intrigued by sharks since he was a little boy. A graduate of the University of South Florida with a natural sciences degree, he started working as a mate on a charter boat out of Daytona in the early 1980s. During the wintertime the charter-boat operations switched to commercial fishing in order to make up for the lull in tourism. They usually focused on bringing in snapper, grouper, and king mackerel, the sorts of fish that commanded the highest market prices. The charter boats would unload their catches at the end of the day on a dock near a few local restaurants, and on the rare occasions when they had snagged a shark by mistake, Sander remembers, it would draw a crowd. “You could drop all the amberjack and mackerel you want; if you dropped a big shark on the dock, everybody came down to your boat.” Still, it was just for show: nobody was interested in buying the sandbar or blacktip shark the charter-boat operators were plunking down upon their return.

In 1983, Sander and his brother decided to strike out on their own and start commercial fishing full-time. They bought their own thirty-two-foot boat, christened it
Jawsome
, and headed out to make a living. They began setting longlines for king mackerel and other species and, on occasion, found themselves pulling up sharks. At the same time, federal fisheries managers were trying to ease up the pressure on groupers, and they started putting out literature on how sharks could appeal to restaurants that were seeking to broaden their menu offerings. Sander and his brother went to work outfitting the
Jawsome
for the task.

“We kind of jerry-rigged a longline system, and, lo and behold, we could sell sharks,” Sander recalls, adding they relied on a hand crank to pull up the line. “In 1984 we went full-time shark fishing. We had tremendous success.”

In the first year, the two fishermen brought in fifty thousand pounds of shark. “Everybody was watching us,” he says. And within a matter of months, other fishing operations started imitating them. A fleet blossomed in Daytona Beach, supplying a steady local market with meat and fins. While selling the meat covered the fishermen’s operating costs, the fins represented pure profit.

“It wouldn’t have been as attractive if that money for the fins wasn’t there. That was bonus money, gravy money,” Sander relates. The price of fins kept going up, from $4 a pound to $9, to $10 and $12, and beyond. The shark fin dealers would gather on the dock, and the fishermen would have their choice of buyers.

By the late 1990s, however, the shark catches began to dwindle, and Sander noticed. He thought it might be time to go “up the hill,” or start working onshore. After a Florida marine patrol officer saw him sorting fins on the dock, enforcement officers hired Sander as a consultant to nab illegal shark traders. He now works full-time for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission as regional coordinator for its Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistical Survey, asking anglers dockside what they’ve been catching.

Sander knows many shark populations have been declining off the Atlantic coast: he’s seen it himself, and he emphasizes, “They’re not just another commodity. They serve an important function in the ocean.” But even though he regularly helps enforcement officers spot illegally caught sharks, he doesn’t see himself as someone on a mission to save the animal he once hunted. Sander still sees it as a fish that might as well be on the menu of Daytona Beach restaurants.

For Sander, working enforcement is just another job, not some sort of moral mission. “I’m not really concerned with it. I’m out of the industry; I have been since 1998,” he offers. “I’m not looking to make things right and restore it back to the level that it’s been before.”

From a practical perspective, it would be nearly impossible to bring the American shark fishery back to pre-exploitation levels. At this point, shark products have become relegated to a niche market, which provides enough of a commercial incentive to keep a relatively low level of fishing active off U.S. shores. There are shark teeth in South Carolina road stop knickknack stores, mako shark on the list of regular menu offerings at Atlantic Seafood Company in an Atlanta strip mall. They remain a banal relic, an allusion to an ancient seafaring lifestyle that is rapidly disappearing. As the sharks disappear, so does our connection to the sea.

——

In Kesennuma City in Japan, one entrepreneur has spent the last half century seeking a middle way when it comes to the shark trade. Kesennuma is a relatively small port in a country that defines itself as a seafaring nation: fewer than seventy thousand people live there, and the city’s fish market lands close to $30 million worth of fish a year. But its residents have taken full advantage of the region’s fertile fishing grounds—Japanese call its jagged coastline the Rias Coast, referring to its sawtooth-like shape, and it straddles two separate bays—for centuries. And the Pacific coast’s riches continue to define the city’s identity and economy.

Three hundred years ago Kesennuma fishermen ventured out in small wooden boats to catch sharks, a time-consuming and dangerous process that helped sustain the local population. Now the city is a lively port where fishing and tourism rank as the biggest moneymakers. As fishing vessels became more mechanized and sophisticated, area fishermen started targeting more lucrative species, such as tuna and Pacific saury, rather than focusing on sharks. But using sharp hooks attached to long lines of rope, they caught plenty of sharks anyway. And that gave Kasumasa Murata a major business opportunity.

Kasumasa Murata grew up far from here in western Japan, on Kyushu Island. But more than fifty years ago he married his wife, Yoneko, a Kesennuma native, and moved to her hometown. At the time Murata came here, the Japanese government was happy to help finance small industrial ventures in the fishing sector, and he decided the other merchants in Kesennuma were missing a possible source of income when they merely sliced off the fins from the sharks piling up on the city’s dock and threw the rest away. “Shark fin in Kesennuma has been world famous, but other parts of the body have not been utilized very well,” he says, sipping cold buckwheat tea in his fish market office. While fishermen in other countries still hack off the fin and throw the shark’s body overboard, he adds, “that’s not our style. I don’t think that’s good for the natural resource. Once we catch a shark, we utilize every part of the body.”

Murata is not exaggerating. Since 1959 he has built up a small but efficient processing operation, a few minutes’ drive from the port where the sharks come in each morning. The aging entrepreneur purchases half of all the fish that arrive at the dock all day, including most of the sharks: blue, mako, and salmon are the ones that swim off the coast here. A handful of workers immediately slice off the sharks’ fins, which are still worth close to ten times as much as the rest of their bodies, before the remaining flesh is carted off to Murata’s processing plant. The long, tubular bodies are placed in a watery holding pond for roughly six hours, to leach out the ammonia that dominates a shark’s body once it’s been killed.