{"id":128567,"date":"2025-09-10T22:27:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/128567\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T22:27:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:27:11","slug":"critically-endangered-sharks-being-sold-as-food-in-us-grocery-stores-new-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/128567\/","title":{"rendered":"Critically endangered sharks being sold as food in US grocery stores, new study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine wandering into your local supermarket and you find it\u2019s selling lion or tiger steaks. You\u2019d probably be surprised. Now imagine the meat in question is just labelled ‘cat’ or ‘felid’ \u2013 you wouldn\u2019t even know which species it came from.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s the situation researchers from the University of North Carolina have revealed in a\u00a0study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science<\/a>\u00a0that examines the selling of shark meat. They visited different food stores and bought and DNA barcoded 29 different products, almost all of which were simply labelled as ‘shark’, to determine what species they actually came from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"SharkShark meat on sale in a US food store. Credit: Savannah Ryburn<\/p>\n

Sharks are the oceans\u2019 apex predators<\/a>, and many of the more than 500 species are threatened with extinction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Savannah Ryburn and colleagues nevertheless found great and scalloped hammerhead shark \u2013\u00a0both assessed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List \u2013 on sale, along with nine other species.<\/p>\n

And this isn\u2019t just a wildlife conservation issue, Ryburn points out. “Scalloped hammerhead shark has very dangerous levels of mercury in it,\u201d Ryburn says, \u201cso if you have no idea what you\u2019re buying, you don\u2019t have any choice as to how much mercury you are consuming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sharks<\/a> at the top of the food chain \u2013\u00a0such as hammerhead or mako sharks<\/a> \u2013\u00a0are more likely to \u2018bioaccumulate\u2019 larger quantities of mercury than sharks such as the bonnethead, which mainly preys on blue crabs.<\/p>\n

Ryburn says, at the very least, US authorities should consider requiring retail outlets to identify what species of shark is being sold.<\/p>\n

Going back two decades, the biggest issue for shark conservation was the practice of finning. In Asian cuisine, fins are highly prized as the main constituent of shark fin soup.<\/p>\n

In 2006, it was estimated that between 26 and 73 million sharks were being killed for their fins every year. To try and reduce exploitation levels, authorities (the EU, for example) began requiring that fishing vessels must land the entire shark carcass and not just take the fins. The idea was it would reduce how many sharks in total were taken because the whole bodies would take up more room on boats.<\/p>\n

But this may have had unintended consequences, says Ryburn. \u201cIt has created a market for shark meat,\u201d she says. Not only that, but shark meat smells of urea and requires a lot of preparation for it to be edible and \u2013\u00a0as a result \u2013\u00a0is sold quite cheaply. \u201cIt\u2019s become a cheap way for people to buy meat,\u201d she adds. And that means many shark species \u2013 the oceanic equivalent of lions or tigers \u2013 are becoming even more endangered.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Top image: shark steaks being sold at a US grocery store. Credit: Savannah Ryburn<\/p>\n

More wildlife stories from around the world<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Imagine wandering into your local supermarket and you find it\u2019s selling lion or tiger steaks. You\u2019d probably be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-128567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}