Revealing part of the closely guarded blend that’ll soon be chucked into a mesh bag and dangled off the side of his boat is Kieren, a locally renowned charter boat skipper who’s preparing to take us miles out to sea in the hope of coming face-to-face with the apex predator we’ve hopped aboard his vessel to meet. One tempted to us by his smelly concoction of “chum” that looks distressingly like last night’s chilli.
我已经加入了一群人，一群人从利物浦一起走下去，在一个朋友的一个朋友上，他们赞美这位26岁的鲨鱼渔夫凯伦的旅行太大而无法忽视。这是一个艰难的赞美。He’s respected for life-long fishing escapades that have seen him working Cornish fishing boats since his early teens, land a 99lb 14oz Blue Shark at the age of 13 – a UK Junior Record at the time – and hook into 830 sharks so far this season. It’s also the reason his charters sell out like pop band tour dates – he’s booked up until the end of 2022, the full year allocated to customers in just five days.
It’s this respectful manner that springs into action a little over an hour into our first drift, as one of the four floats – a DIY rig made from a fluorescent Mountain Dew bottle – plummets under the surface, and a loud “We’re on!” from one of the Liverpool lads marks the start of a 10-minute duel through the calm water’s surface. Reels creak and scream, rods bend and backs strain, before our torpedo-shaped visitor looms up from the dark.
This year, data from a team at Canada’s Simon Fraser University and the International Union for Conservation revealed that global populations of oceanic shark and rays have declined by 71% in the last fifty years – a rate that, if kept at the same speed, would lead to loss of entire species in just two decades.
“未经管制的过度捕捞与世界各地的腐败和无效的政策相加，”汤姆说，直言不讳地。这是一个难以与他们的鳍，肉，肝油和更有价值的“零件”争辩的陈述，导致高达27300万鲨鱼从海上拉出的近似，并在2000年代初被杀死。“Many sharks make vast migrations every year – the Blue Shark swims across the Atlantic to feed in the UK, for example – so, realistically, although we can control what happens to sharks in our waters, we’re helpless when it comes to what happens to them further afield.”
在2021年8月宣布，英国很快就会通过成为第一个欧洲国家禁止分离鲨鱼鳍的进出口和含有它们的产品的欧洲国家作为海洋保护领导者的全球领导者。It’s a move that’ll undoubtedly benefit global stock of the UK resident Blue Shark, the top species impacted by ‘finning’ – the practice of cutting the fin off at sea and throwing the helpless body back into the water to die slowly, and one that is already illegal in our home waters (despite gaping loopholes being exploited by foreign vessels). But it’s hard to think the difference will be anything but negligible, given that it’s a species protected by just a handful of national catch limits around the world.
“Not only do sharks predate on jellyfish, but they regulate the health of other fish that predate jellyfish also – if weak and sick fish aren’t picked off then disease creeps into that species, and science has shown that the populations drop far lower than with regulating predators in the picture. And when both the sharks and the jellyfish-eating fish are removed, we’re looking at huge problems – global food and water shortages that would inevitably lead to war.”
“这是一个似乎几乎太科幻的预示着 - 相信 - 长腿巨大的跛脚的肿块是人类的终极垮台”
这是一个似乎几乎太科幻的预示着 - 相信 - 腿部笨重的块状物质的终极垮台。But if you were part of the record numbers of staycationers in Cornwall this summer, there’s a strong probability that you’ll have noticed how Compass Jellyfish are now as much a staple feature of the Great British Summer Holiday as ice cream and sand in your sandwiches. Even steaming out of Penzance harbour with Kieren, we plow through huge blooms of them – more than our skipper has ever seen before, he tells us.
像Misool Eco Resort这样的地方是该治疗的一个例子。Situated in the far-flung south of Indonesia – one of the world’s biggest players in the export of shark fins – it’s a diving and conservation area built on a former finning camp that has transformed 300,000 acres into a protected marine reserve where finning, harvesting of turtle eggs, and the (absolutely insane-sounding) practice of cyanide fishing is banned, leading it to become one of only a few places on the planet where the quality of reef is improving year on year.
Back on the boat as we head homeward after 11 hours of bobbing about on the sea, I ask Kieren, perhaps with a small pang of guilt, how what we’re doing is in anyway playing a role in the protection of sharks and our oceans.
“现在，事情蓬勃发展。几年前，常规赛将看到300个鲨鱼，但现在最好的季节最多达到1800人。我们不仅仅是严格地抓住和释放，现在捕获的所有鲨鱼都留在水中。today, and that I’ve seen through the season, will be recorded, along with the individual locations where we saw and released them. I’ll calculate a rough size for each, and as we’ve done for many years, will pass on that data to the Pat Smith Database – the biggest dataset for shark captures in Europe, and the second biggest in the world.”
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