Blue alert
Theresa Guise and Peter de Maagt both are underwater photographers and sharkaholics. What they don’t like, is petition requests …till this happened…
The phone makes the familiar buzzing sound to indicate the arrival of a new message. “Hi Peter, have you signed the petition: Ask Sushi Wok 500+ restaurants to take shark off the menu.” asks Theresa.. I opened the link and to my surprise it was about blue sharks!. These sharks are one of our favourites, almost like puppy dogs of the sea. They have one of the friendliest looks you can imagine: with huge, pretty and inviting eyes that match their playful demeanour. Their cute faces and striking blue skin made me fall in love with them long ago. In fact, they served as facebook profile or cover pictures. That can’t be true! Let’s continue reading. Apparently a large chain of restaurants in Russia had recently began selling sushi rolls for $ 4 each with the meat of blue sharks from Singapore. Well, it’s Russia and Asia, no surprise as our prejudices prevailed and our knee-jerk reaction was to ignore,
But we thought about it and remembered that a year ago the UK Shark Trust used blue shark images to start a crowd funding action to introduce science-based catch limits for sharks. Specifically for blue sharks, shortfin mako, tope, smoothhounds and catsharks, the species which account for over 97% of registered Atlantic shark landings. Apparently, 1 in 3 sharks caught worldwide is a blue shark.
It was also an eye opener to realise that Western World is a significant global shark fishing power with three EU Member States among the world’s top twenty shark fishing nations! So, we shouldn’t assume that Asian countries take all the blame. We need to realize that our our part of the world is also responsible for the decline in shark population. For example, there has been recent controversy in the UK about the well-known “fish and chips”. Most of us who have eaten this cuisine never knew what type of “fish” was used. There was a general outcry after the gruesome discovery that the “fish” was actually shark, misleadingly labelled as dogfish, flake or rock salmon. Clearly, the restaurants realize that serving shark meat is controversial or they wouldn’t have false and misleading descriptions.
If you go to the internet, information conveys a significant improvement in this situation “Many well-known Asian hotel chains are taking sharks off their menu” and that “In Europe, almost no shark meat is served in hotels and restaurants. ” That’s great; we are relieved.
Can you imagine our surprise when we discovered a picture on Facebook which showed that an all-you-can-eat restaurant chain in the north of the Netherlands was offering blue shark on the menu?
Wow! We didn’t see that one coming! So let’s work to stop all shark finning and to get sharks off the menu of restaurants. So, please spend a few seconds and visit https://www.change.org/p/
Authors: Theresa Guise and Peter de Maagt
