ORLANDO, Florida ― Imagine a bowl of steaming soup with succulent morsels severed from the tail of a cruelly slaughtered manatee.

It sounds awful but isn’t far-fetched. Sharks are served in restaurants around the world in fin soup, even though about one-third of the 450 species are threatened with extinction. And there’s no way for diners to know the type of shark they are consuming.

To find that out, shark-attack survivors associated with the Pew Environment Group, working with the Discovery Channel and researchers from Stony Brook University in New York, collected samples from restaurants nationwide as part of the largest survey of its kind.

Results of DNA analysis released Wednesday confirmed the researchers’ fears: Many of the sharks detected in the soup samples are in trouble in the wild and, even if they get beefed-up protections soon, some may not recover for years, if ever, because they reproduce so slowly.

“Sharks aren’t like other fish,” said Jill Hepp, director of Pew’s Global Shark Conservation campaign. “They can go years between reproducing. When they do reproduce, they have just two or three pups.”

The samples were gathered by the shark-attack survivors, who, despite scars and in some cases missing limbs, have become activists for shark conservation.

Debbie Salamone, a Pew spokeswoman focused on shark protection worldwide and fish conservation in the Southeastern U.S., organized the collecting of soup samples from restaurants in 14 U.S. cities, including Orlando and Fort Lauderdale.

Salamone, whose Achilles tendon was severed nearly a decade ago by a shark at a Florida beach, found it difficult to determine which restaurants serve fin soup, perhaps because of growing public concern about the main ingredient.

“If you call to ask, sometimes they just hang up,” Salamone said. Discovery’s “Shark Fight” episode, which will air next week, covers the survivors’ conservation work and participation in the soup survey.

“Even if it’s on an online menu, sometimes when you go, they will not serve it,” Salamone said. “And even when it’s not on a menu, if you asked, they might serve it anyway. It’s tricky to know how many restaurants really are serving it.”

She and other attack survivors, along with some other volunteers, secured 51 samples for DNA analysis for scientists at Stony Brook and the Pritzker Laboratory at Chicago’s Field Museum. Obtaining the DNA was tricky, too.

By the time shark fins become soup, they have been frozen, dried, bleached and aged ― not to mention cooked in boiling water. Yet the team of scientists extracted DNA data from 32 samples and was able to identify a specific species in nearly all cases.

The stunner was finding that a Boston restaurant’s soup contained the endangered scalloped hammerhead. Blue-shark fin was found in 14 samples from across the country. In all, eight species were detected through DNA.

The soups from three restaurants in Orlando were found to contain blue, bull and school shark ― all on lists of species at risk of extinction.

The scientists could tease only partial results from a Fort Lauderdale sample, but it was enough to identify a group of species that includes bull sharks.

Shark-fin soup is a traditional Asian cuisine regarded as a luxury. But worldwide demand for it has surged ― as has opposition to the soup by animal-rights and environmental groups. Several states, including California, have banned shark-fin sales, for use in soup or otherwise.

Iris Ho, wildlife-campaigns manager for Humane Society International, said her group and others will encourage Florida and other East Coast states to adopt similar bans. The environmental damage caused by fin soup is grim, she said, and the cruelty of “finning” is intolerable.

“The sharks are usually still alive when they are thrown back into the water,” she said. “It’s often a very slow and painful death. No animal should suffer that way.”

Pew’s Global Shark Conservation campaign is focused on getting the U.S. and other nations to dramatically strengthen global protections for sharks.

It’s about “keeping sharks in the water,” said Hepp, the campaign’s director.

Finning sharks and dumping their bodies back into the ocean is banned in U.S. waters under a law that the attack survivors were instrumental in strengthening.

Other countries also prohibit the practice; still, demand for fins remains strong. Fishermen simply haul the sharks back to port before cutting off fins that can fetch $300 a pound.

Monica Allen, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the U.S. outlaws the landing of 19 shark species and, thanks in part to the 2010 Shark Conservation Act, “has some of the strongest shark-conservation rules of any nation.”

But finning remains legal and poorly monitored in much of the world ― and is the primary reason, sharks’ defenders say, that 73 million sharks are caught and killed each year.

“It’s sometimes a tough issue for people to really understand, because it seems very far away, both in terms of where most of the consumption happens ― either in Hong Kong or southern China, Taiwan or Singapore ― and where the sharks live: the remote Pacific and in the middle of the Atlantic,” Hepp said.

Michael Heithaus, director of Florida International University’s School of Environment, Arts and Society, said it might be easier for people to think of sharks as they do lions, tigers and other top predators: essential for keeping their environments in balance.

“If we overfish them too much, and they aren’t filling that roll of top predators, you might have ecosystems change so much that it hurts other fisheries,” Heithaus said.

“You can cause big changes in the ecosystem that can be bad not just for the ecosystem but for people’s dinner plates and pocketbooks as well.”

By Kevin Spear

(The Orlando Sentinel)

(MCT Information Services)