Shark & ray meat consumption no longer restricted to India’s tribal & coastal peoples: Paper

The meat of sharks and rays, for long consumed by tribal and coastal people in India, has found favour among new demographic categories such as foreign tourists and Indian middle- and upper classes. This could lead to more unsustainable fishing of shark species, imperiling them in what is already the world’s third biggest exploiter of sharks and rays, a new study has stated.

Divya Karnad from the Department of Environmental Studies at Sonipat’s Ashoka University and others who carried out the research, identified 2,649 seafood restaurants in 10 coastal states and Union territories of India — Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal.

All of these had online menus. Some 292 among them mentioned shark meat on their menus.

The researchers found that Goa had the highest percentage of ‘elasmobranch’ (shark and ray) meat selling restaurants (35.8 per cent), followed by Tamil Nadu (34.6 per cent) and Maharashtra (4.6 per cent).

Goa and Tamil Nadu together accounted for 70 per cent of all restaurants serving shark meat in India. Some 251.6 tonnes of shark meat are sold every year in India’s restaurants. That is about 83,866 sharks weighing 3 kg each. This figure is equal to 9.8 per cent of India’s annual elasmobranch landings (A ‘landing’ is defined as the catches of marine fish landed in foreign or domestics ports).

Changing patterns

The authors embarked on the study to find out how local shark and ray meat consumption is having an impact on various elasmobranch species in India.

Sharks have especially been targeted for their fins to make ‘shark fin soup’, considered a delicacy in East Asian cuisine. The process involves cutting the fins of a live shark on board a fishing vessel and then throwing it overboard to die a painful death.

Karnad and the other authors stated:

Recent trends indicate that even as the fin trade continues to imperil threatened species, there is increasing evidence of more complex drivers, such as local elasmobranch meat consumption, particularly in the Global South. Elasmobranch meat trade is actually higher in volume and value than the fin trade, comprising 63.41 per cent of the total elasmobranch trade value (US$ 4.1 billion between 2012 and 2019) but remains poorly studied at local scales.

Over a third of shark and ray species are threatened with extinction globally and overfishing driven by human consumption is a key threat to over 95 per cent of these threatened species, the authors added.

Sharks and rays have been consumed for centuries by communities living on India’s long coastline as well as tribal groups.

The study enumerates a number of species that are eaten in the country:

• Spadenose shark (Scoliodon laticaudus; Near Threatened)
• Milk shark (Rhizoprionodon acutus; Vulnerable)
• Gray sharpnose shark (R. oligolinx; Near Threatened)
• Reticulate whipray (Himantura uarnak; Endangered)
• Reticulate whipray

“Consumption was historically limited to the poorer sections of society, including coastal and tribal people. But demand for fresh, salted, and dried elasmobranch meat has increased since the 1960s and 1970s in South Asia and globally,” the authors wrote.

They noted that even deep-sea sharks like Bramble shark (Echinorhinus brucus; Endangered), Bluntnose sixgill shark (Hexanchus griseus; Near Threatened), Bigeye thresher shark (Alopias superciliosus; Vulnerable), Centrophorus spp. and Squalus spp. are now consumed in India.

India has banned the live-finning of sharks and also the export of fins of all shark and ray species. Ten species are completely protected from any fishing and trade.

But fishing of sharks and rays is continuing, driven in part by legal local meat consumption, “which is likely increasing in the context of declines in teleost fish catch,” the authors noted.

Insights into changing consumption patterns with regard to shark and ray meat in India were best revealed by Goa.

The state, on India’s western seaboard, does have a long-established shark consumption tradition. However, as the authors noted, “elasmobranch landings in Goa relative to the total marine landings in the state have generally been lower than the national average”.

Prevalence of meat consumption here may therefore reflect more recent increases in demand and consumption of elasmobranchs in this state, they added.

In Goa, the two main groups who specifically ordered sharks were local Goans and foreign tourists. While Goans preferred Ambotik, a local Goan dish, the tourists from Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and Israel preferred butter garlic shark and shark fry.

Local interviewees told the researchers foreign tourists preferred shark meat for:

1. Tts distinct, acquired taste
2. Because it was easy to eat with soft bones
3. It was a part of their diet at home
4. It was not easily available in their home country

The researchers warned that local consumption of shark meat in India threatens small-bodied sharks as well as juvenile individuals of large-bodied species.

“The threat to juveniles could affect recruitment into reproductive age classes, enhancing the declines of these large-bodied species. Unsustainable fishing pressure would then be increasingly exerted on small-bodied species,” they wrote.

The researchers suggested various measures to reduce the consumption of sharks and rays: Substituting other types of seafood as alternatives in regional cuisines:

• Bycatch reduction
• Increased price
• Seafood consumer awareness campaigns

One interesting deterrent could be making restaurants and consumers aware of the health risks involved by eating such meat as many sharks and rays have been found to carry concentrations of heavy and toxic metals above permissible limits inside their bodies.

Regional hotspots and drivers of shark meat consumption in India was published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice. Its authors are Karnad, S Narayani, Shruthi Kottillil, Sudha Kottillil, Trisha Gupta, Alissa Barnes, Andrew Dias and Y Chaitanya Krishna.