Oceana supporters bombarded online retailer Amazon.com with requests to stop selling shark fin soup. Within hours, Amazon.com had pulled the item from its virtual shelves. Tens of millions of sharks are killed each year for their fins. According to scientists, shark populations are crashing around the world.
Oceana and other members of the Shark Alliance scored a major victory for sharks in the European Parliament when the Parliament decided to reject a recommendation from its own Fisheries Committee to increase the allowable ratio of shark fins to bodies from 5 percent to 6.5 percent.
Oceana had access to military declassified documents which highlighted the damage that the use of active sonar produces in cetaceans and marine wildlife.
After two years of intensive lobbying by Oceana in Brussels and Madrid, the European Union prohibited destructive fishing practices, including bottom trawling, which destroys important marine habitat, in over 160 million acres around the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands. The area protected covers an area larger than France.
In a historic conservation move, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council adopted the Oceana approach and closed nearly 95,5 million hectares of ocean, including recently discovered deep sea coral gardens, to bottom trawling, industrial fishing’s version of clear cutting. The area protected is roughly twice the size of the state of California.
After campaigning by Oceana, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council voted to protect deep-sea coral communities in New England and Mid-Atlantic submarine canyons from destructive monkfish bottom trawling gear.
Oceana successfully pressured the U.S. government to require larger TEDs (turtle excluder devices) on shrimp nets in the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic Ocean, saving an estimated 60,000 sea turtles a year.
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We have already protected nearly 4 million square miles of ocean and innumerable sea life - but there is still more to be done.
Oceana in Europe gratefully acknowledges EU funding support.
