ROCHESTER, N.Y. \u2014 A hammerhead shark was sold at the Rochester Public Market on Saturday, and a video of the shark quickly went viral on TikTok with 150,000 views.<\/p>\n
Chief Investigative Reporter Berkeley Brean spoke with the vendor and state officials about the unusual sale. Frank An runs Great Ocean Seafood and bought the shark from Boston. He sold the whole thing, including the head, on Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly I don\u2019t like too much attention so I would rather it have not but here we are,\u201d An said.<\/p>\n
DEC Investigation<\/p>\n
DEC police came to An\u2019s warehouse in Rochester on Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat were they trying to figure out?\u201d Brean asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether we were in compliance, whether we had the correct paperwork and all that,\u201d An said.<\/p>\n
An confirmed he was in compliance. On Tuesday afternoon, the DEC said it found no violations with the shark at the public market. \u201cNo Environmental Conservation Laws were violated in possessing or selling the hammerhead shark at the Rochester Public Market,\u201d the DEC wrote in an email. <\/p>\n
\u201cIs it real? That\u2019s crazy\u201d<\/p>\n
Brean showed the video to people outside the market.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it real?\u201d one woman asked.
\u201cIt is,\u201d Brean said.
\u201cThat\u2019s crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
One woman questioned where it came from. \u201cWe\u2019re very very very far from the coast. I don\u2019t know where this came from?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s the big deal?\u201d asked a man.
\u201cA hammerhead shark sold at the public market,\u201d Brean said.
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t surprise me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Experts say it\u2019s a Scalloped Hammerhead<\/p>\n
Chris Paparo runs the Marine Science Center at SUNY Stony Brook. He identified the shark as a scalloped hammerhead. \u201cThe species of shark that\u2019s in the video looks like a scalloped hammerhead shark,\u201d Paparo said.<\/p>\n
Paparo took videos of a scalloped hammerhead 10 and 30 miles off the coast of Long Island. They are legal to catch and sell. \u201cAs long as they\u2019re properly permitted there\u2019s no issue with it being there,\u201d Paparo said.<\/p>\n
An said he would rather not get another shark after all the attention. \u201cI\u2019d rather not,\u201d An said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
Some sharks, including several hammerheads, are protected. Greg Metzger with the South Fork Natural History Museum Shark Research Program on Long Island explained why. \u201cBack in the 70s and 80s, there was an emphasis put on trying to catch sharks and unfortunately for the sharks we did too good of a job and so some of these species numbers have been reduced,\u201d Metzger said.<\/p>\n
Metzger said protections are working. \u201cThe U.S. is a very good place for a shark to be these days because there\u2019s lot of evidence from various species that populations that were reduced are indeed coming back,\u201d Metzger said.<\/p>\n
There are up to 25 different kinds of sharks along the coast of New York.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFor Related Stories:\u00a0hammerhead shark<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0NYS DEC<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Instagram<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Rochester Public Market<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ROCHESTER, N.Y. \u2014 A hammerhead shark was sold at the Rochester Public Market on Saturday, and a video…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[18535,4136,41343,297434,79,201],"class_list":["post-683725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-hammerhead-shark","tag-instagram","tag-nys-dec","tag-rochester-public-market","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}