Letter to Editor of Marine Policy—publication refused!

With co-authors Dr. Brian W. Darvell and Professor Gilles Cuny, I recently published a paper in Marine Policy: Response to “A United States shark fin ban would undermine sustainable shark fisheries” D.S. Shiffman & R.E. Hueter, Marine Policy 85 (2017) 138–140

It showed that the authors had used incorrect figures in order to promote shark fishing in the USA in their paper and had also minimized the shark fin trade and the dangers of eliminating the oceans' top predators.

The same authors reacted by publishing another paper which essentially said the same thing, except that it claimed to be a rebuttal of our paper, and made several incorrect statements about it—their paper was essentially a thinly veiled personal attack. Similarly, we became aware that those authors, who appear to be incapable of making any kind of intellectual argument, have been personally attacking us openly elsewhere on the Internet.

So with my co-authors, I wrote a Letter to the Editor to make sure that the errors in it are noted, but Marine Policy refused to publish it. The text is below:

"Titled with a strong claim, the paper “Rebuttal to “Response to ‘A United States shark fin ban would undermine sustainable shark fisheries’ I.F. Porcher et al., Marine Policy 104 (2019) 85–89”” does not begin to address, never mind rebut, the many points we made in debunking the authors’ original paper, Shiffman & Hueter 2017 [1].

"It claims that we cited the Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act of 2019 (SFTEA2019) instead of peer-reviewed scientific papers, thus implying that our work is unscientific. But it was Marine Policy, through its reviewers, that insisted that we add citations to SFTEA2019 where applicable. Our paper was fully referenced with top scientific studies before it was reviewed.

"Our statement on commercial shark fishing was also required by our reviewers. In pretending that it is a “central premise” of our paper”, Shiffman and Hueter misrepresent it. Debunking their points one by one was the whole purpose of our paper, which should be self-evident. We dealt with each systematically, with cited support from rigorous peer-reviewed papers. Marine Policy knows that our position on commercial shark fishing was added in revision because it was required, and was not part of our original work. Permitting such invented criticisms to be printed now seems perverse.

"That statement is also misquoted. Shiffman and Hueter say now: “The central premise of Porcher et al.’s argument is that no shark fishery “beyond that for immediate local consumption” [2] can be sustainable.” The omission of the critical qualifier “any commercial operation” changes the sense fundamentally. This is simply dishonest.

"In the absence of any actual rebuttal of our points, and in the failure even to address them, one must conclude that they are sound in the eyes of Shiffman and Hueter. For example, a major point we made was that the current trend of turning to sharks for meat, which is what Shiffman and Hueter recommend, is a dangerous development due to sharks’ ecological importance. This is not addressed.

"Only peripheral details are criticised. Sharks have been seriously depleted by the fin trade in most of the countries that have declared themselves shark sanctuaries. Shiffman and Hueter deny that and focus on the Bahamas to say that we are wrong. Yet the largest recreational shark fishery in the world lies just across the straits from the Bahamas in the USA, so it is not surprising that the Bahamas acted to protect its sharks.

"Our argument was that the shark fin trade is global in nature, and responsible for a catastrophic decline in shark numbers worldwide. SFTEA2019 was put forth to address that decline. If the USA withdraws from the shark fin market it will not only significantly weaken the trade, but influence other countries considering similar legislation. Shiffman & Hueter 2017 may be politically desirable for shark fisheries but it is scientifically indefensible.

"Our discussion of the impossibility of accurately assessing mortality and sustainability in sharks is dismissed by protesting that we have a distrust of fisheries science. The fact that the USA classifies imports and exports of raw frozen fins as meat, thus obfuscating the data, is ignored, as is the lack of agreement between FAO’s data and NOAA’s customs data, which indicates that many times the quantities of shark fins recorded in USA official records are imported into, and exported from, the country.

"Shiffman and Hueter’s quibble over minor details in Dent and Clarke (2015) [2] seems to highlight their lack of concern for the actual status of sharks and the global impact of the shark fin trade.

"This paper now, as did Shiffman and Hueter (2017), reflects very closely the ideas of the shark fishing coalitions now lobbying Congress not to adopt SFTEA2019, particularly the Sustainable Shark Alliance (SSA). If there is such a link, it ought to be declared, whether or not subject to remuneration. Although we did not discuss the Sustainable Shark Fisheries and Trade Act of 2019 (SSFTA2019), the authors refer to it now as if it will easily solve the problem of shark depletion and make SFTEA2019 irrelevant, ignoring the fact that SSFTA2019 would be impossible to implement and actually illegal under international law.

"SSFTA2019 would require the imposition of American fishing rules worldwide. How it would be financed and controlled, how a sustainable harvest could be established for each of the nearly 500 species of shark, how it would be maintained long-term, and how every country would be made to keep politics, financial self-interest, and corruption, to say nothing of criminality, out of the process, are not addressed. There is no international body that can force sovereign countries to do anything on this scale. Some countries, especially those with large fisheries, have consistently been resistant even to controls on fishing that are based on scientific data, let alone foreign diktat.

"World Trade Organization agreements require that no country can favour the imports of one nation over another, nor ban imports of a product, while locally producing and exporting that product. SSFTA2019 appears to be in violation of those agreements.

"A recent global study by the World Bank, Sunken Billions Revisited (2017) [3], found that fishing effort should be reduced to get the best economic result in the evolving global fisheries crisis – 90% of fisheries are overfished. The necessary fundamental reforms must follow two parallel and simultaneous paths: (a) stock recovery (primarily by reduction of fishing effort), and (b) habitat restoration. Sunken Billions Revisited specifically predicts social unrest in fisheries because jobs will be lost. It recommends that fishing subsidies, which have encouraged overfishing, be used to help ease the social transition.

"The authors’ failure to argue a scientific case, and their lack of concession to the facts that undermine their original pro-shark-fishing paper, constitutes an unscientific belittling of much work beyond our paper."

References:

[1] D.S. Shiffman, R.E. Hueter, A United States shark fin ban would undermine sustainable shark fisheries, Mar. Pol. (2017) 85: 138–140.

[2] F. Dent, S.C. Clarke, State of the Global Market for Shark Products, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Fisheries and Aquaculture (Technical Paper 590) (2015)

[3] World Bank, 2017. "The Sunken Billions Revisited" World Bank Publications, The World Bank, number 24056.

Ila France Porcher
Dr. Brian W. Darvell
Prof. Gilles Cuny

In spite of this, however, it is becoming evident that with these latest, completely unscientific efforts to block the Shark Fin Elimination Act of 2019, these authors have essentially committed career suicide. Support for their ideas has collapsed, which may explain this desperate attempt to save face.

This is not the first time that Shiffman has written to support shark fishing, commercial and otherwise. That is about all he does, while posing as a shark conservationist. Each time he writes promoting shark fishing, I criticize it. Here are two earlier examples:

Forget the Pseudoscience: All Fish Feel Pain

More Fisheries Pseudoscience