MEXICO CITY — Fishing for hammerhead sharks is now illegal in Costa Rica, thanks to the signing of a new executive decree this month by President Rodrigo Chaves Robles.

The decree prohibits the snatch, transportation, storage or sale of hammerhead sharks or their byproducts, equivalent to fins and enamel. Banned species consist of the gentle hammerhead (Sphyrna zygaena), scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) and extensive hammerhead (Sphyrna mokarran).

No matter being critically endangered — and right below CITES Appendix II — hammerhead sharks were supplied and supplied in Costa Rica for years. The animals are prized for their fins, which would be assuredly sent to international locations like China to be frail in shark fin soup, really apt as a delicacy.

“Here is simply too late and it’s reach too little,” said Randall Arauz, a biologist with Marine Detect World. “Pointless to train I’m gay they banned hammerhead shark fishing. But hammerhead sharks were listed below CITES by initiative of Costa Rica in 2013 and it changed into their obligation to ban hammerhead shark fishing commercialization, extraction, every little thing. That’s been our battle for the closing ten years.”

In that time, Arauz said hammerhead shark populations in Costa Rica accept as true with declined by around 90%.

Heaps of presidents accept as true with, over the closing decade, gone backward and forward about hammerhead shark protections, in allotment over topic for the wellbeing of the fishing alternate. Feeble president Luis Guillermo Solís issued a decree in 2017 legalizing noteworthy of the shark alternate greatest for the decree to be struck down by the supreme court docket about a years later.

In 2018, the nation established a hammerhead shark sanctuary in Golfo Dulce — a gulf in the southeastern fringe of the nation with excessive biodiversity — that right wetlands frail by the sharks for breeding.

A lawsuit that year claimed the Costa Rican Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture (INCOPESCA) changed into attentive to and even accelerating the overfishing of hammerhead sharks. And a few conservation groups accused the Ministry Ambiance and Energy (MINAE) of permitting the export of hundreds hammerhead shark fins to China.

Rather quite a lot of the caught hammerheads, the lawsuit claimed, weren’t reaching sexual maturity, making it advanced for their population numbers to rebound. MINAE and INCOPESCA didn’t respond to a search files from for advise.

Costa Rica has abstained a enormous quantity of occasions at some point of the years from vote casting on shark ban proposals at some point of CITES conferences, together with to an outcry from environmentalists that the nation is beautiful at talking about conservation with out truly following by on it.

“Here is beautiful files,” Arauz said. “But let’s specialise in in the event that they honestly act on the hammerheads.”

Banner image: Hammerhead sharks swimming off of Cocos Island, Costa Rica. Report courtesy of John Voo/Flickr.

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