The fastest shark in the sea is losing the race against extinction.
Capable of reaching speeds of up to 45 miles per hour, the shortfin Mako is being outpaced by the online trafficking of endangered species—a practice that has contributed to dwindling their numbers to dangerously low levels.
In a new study that helps document how widespread the practice has become, two University of Miami researchers and others searched online sales of thousands of animal species at risk of global extinction, finding that the endangered mako emerged as the most targeted threatened species, with their jaws and other body parts being sold across hundreds of open marketplaces and social media sites.
"We often think of wildlife trophies in terms of terrestrial animals, but our work reveals sharks and rays are a large component of that trade," said Jennifer Jacquet, a professor in the University's Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy and one of the authors of the recently published study.
All told, sharks represented nine of the top ten threatened species identified in the study for sale on the open English-language web, the study reports. Other shark species such as the longfin mako, sandbar, pelagic thresher, and scalloped hammerhead also held infamous spots high on the list, Jacquet noted.
Published online in the April issue of Biological Conservation, the study, "Prevalence of endangered shark trophies in automated detection of the online wildlife trade," is believed to be the first of its kind. It not only tracks online sales of sharks but also a multitude of other animals—from caribou and sturgeon to the java sparrow, Siamese crocodile, and Indian tarantula—over a 15-week period in 2018.
The researchers automatically collected data to analyze online sales of threatened animals across 148 English-text online marketplaces, then created a web crawler that searched for online sales of 13,267 animal species at risk of global extinction, as classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as well as 706 animal species on Appendix I of the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
Their crawler targeted sites across the globe. Among the findings:
- After deleting duplicates, applying filters, and manual vetting, the researchers identified 546 listings containing potentially threatened or trade-restricted animals representing 83 species. Of those listings, 47 advertised critically endangered species, 251 advertised endangered species, and 236 advertised vulnerable species.
- Across all IUCN statuses, 52 listings advertised species on CITES Appendix I. A total of 334, or 61 percent of all listings, solicited shark trophies.
- Mammals comprised another quarter of the listings, followed by single-digit proportions of bony fishes, birds, reptiles, and minor fractions of rays and invertebrates.
"Other studies have used manual methods to detect the online trade of threatened species, but they typically focused on a very specific species or group of species," said Spencer Roberts, an Abess Center Ph.D. student and study coauthor who examined the study's raw data, reinterpreting it to build visual graphs. "Our study is unique in that it looks for them all and it uses a highly automated method."
Researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York University's Center for Data Science, and the Department of Criminal Justice at Farmingdale State College also participated in the study.
It did not include data from the dark web. The extent and nature of wildlife trade on that platform is difficult to assess, making the scale and scope of the wildlife trade even bigger than most people realize, Jacquet said.
"Society has underestimated the threat posed by the trade in wildlife," she said. "But direct exploitation of animals is still the No. 1 driver of species decline. So, as much as we worry about climate change and habitat degradation, we still directly kill animals for both consumption and for the trade in their parts, and it's a serious problem."
Combating the problem has proved challenging, as online platforms are regarded as marketplaces that connect buyers and sellers and are typically not held legally responsible, according to Jacquet. But stigmatizing the ownership of wildlife trophies, she added, could be one way to help mitigate the practice.
"A very small number of people are obsessed with buying animal parts, and this has helped fuel enormous online marketplaces and incentivized the killing of endangered species all for the benefit of a very limited number of humans," she said. "We need governments and civil society groups to stigmatize the wildlife trade as a whole rather than deal with the problem species by species in a legislative way."
Some web platforms have now implemented restrictions on the sales listings of parts from endangered or protected animals, said Roberts, adding that he and the other researchers plan to conduct follow-up studies to determine how effective those measures have been.
"It is also our goal is to refine our methods to generate tools that allow web platforms to quickly identify and prevent the sale of endangered species online," he said.
It is Jacquet's hope that other endangered species will attain the same status as whales.
"We don't see many whale parts being sold online; it's extremely taboo," she said. "We have a different view of whales in all sorts of respects than we do of, say, sharks or even terrestrial animals to some extent. Why can't we achieve that same kind of moral status for other animals that we've achieved for whales?"
