Harvesting sharks in American Gulf waters

Excerpts from an article in the Washington Post:

Just off the coast of south Texas, that border is wide open, unmarked and largely unpatrolled. The men who cross it at night sometimes carry drugs and immigrants. But overwhelmingly, they’re looking for new bounty in American waters: sharks whose fins are bound mostly for China. The global trade in shark fins is worth more than a billion dollars, experts say.

Biologists estimate that Mexican fishermen annually catch more than 50,000 sharks illegally in the United States because the best shark fishing is north of the border...

“It’s the same game every day. They chase us, sometimes seizing our boats. And the next day we do it again,” said Eric Carillo, whose family runs a small shark fishing business just south of the border in Playa Bagdad, bringing in $5,000 to $10,000 a month. Most of their profits come from fins, but fishermen also sell shark meat to Mexico City markets.

Each year, the Coast Guard apprehends dozens, seizing thousands of dollars in gear. But the fishermen spend less than 24 hours in U.S. custody, and then they are sent back across the border... because the laws are tailored to drug traffickers and human smugglers, shark fishermen are able to operate with near impunity. Some scientists worry that years of unregulated fishing could soon take a toll on the gulf, potentially disrupting an entire ecosystem...

“When we fish here, we catch next to nothing. Little fish. And barely any of them,” said Carlos Guerra, a Mexican citizen, who started working on the beach in December, days after being deported from Chicago. “When we cross the border, we catch so much. We make a lot of money.” His reasoning, shared by other fishermen, is that American regulations have left its shark population mostly intact while the lack of Mexican enforcement has caused years of overfishing...

Some toss hundreds of longlines and hooks in the water at a time. Others use miles of gill nets, which hold dozens of sharks: mostly juvenile black tips, but also sand bar sharks, hammerheads and other species. The fins — which eventually head to Asia, where they’re used in shark fin soup — are worth $35 per pound in Playa Bagdad...

The fishermen show no sign of relenting. In the past two months, officers have seen another uptick in apprehensions. The objects of those pursuits were almost all familiar faces — they had been apprehended several times before. “I’ve lost more than 13 boats to the patrol in the last 10 years. We’ve lost thousands of dollars in equipment,” Carillo said. “But we’ve made four times more money fishing across the border than we would have made otherwise. It’s worth the risk.”

Additonal details and more photos at the Washington Post.