The appearance of a shark fin piercing the ocean surface is often seen as a sign of danger to humans. Even more dangerous to sharks is the sight of a shark fin floating in a bowl of soup. Around the world, sharks are in crisis. Many species have suffered population declines of 90 to 99 [...]

Demand for the gills of manta and mobula rays has risen dramatically in the past 10 years for use in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), even though they were not historically used for this purpose, a team of researchers from the conservation organizations Shark Savers and WildAid has discovered. “We first came across manta and mobula [...]

The unsustainable demand for the Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup is directly responsible for the slaughter of more than 70 million sharks every year. In a process known as finning, the sharks are caught, pulled onto boats, stripped of their valuable fins and dumped back into the ocean where they slowly and painfully [...]

It’s not exactly easy to study the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) in the wild, but new evidence suggests that while we’ve been worrying about tigers, gorillas and other obviously rare species, the great white has been quietly disappearing from the oceans. We already knew that shark species around the world have experienced dramatic declines [...]

Plenty of species have been observed eating their own young. Still other species see their young competing for resources, so only the strongest survive. But the grey nurse shark (Carcharias taurus) takes it a step further: its young have a tendency to eat each other, in utero. You read that right. As grisly as it [...]

The largest fish in the ocean is the whale shark (Rhincodon typus). This massive, migratory fish can grow up to twelve meters in length, but its enormous mouth is designed to eat the smallest of critters: plankton. While the biggest, the whale shark isn’t the only gigantic filter-feeding shark out there: the basking shark and [...]