It has been four years since Juan Pablo Muñoz, a biologist with the Galápagos Science Center of Ecuador’s Universidad San Francisco de Quito, entered the hold of a seized Chinese refrigerator ship, or reefer, and found thousands of slaughtered sharks. The images of that day, Aug. 13, 2017, remain engraved in his memory.

“We literally put ourselves in a giant freezer, at temperatures below zero [Celsius],” he says of his time on the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999, which had been seized by Ecuadorian authorities after entering the marine reserve that rings the country’s famed Galápagos Islands. “The sharks were mutilated. We took them out, piece by piece, shark by shark, to identify the species, but it was very difficult because they had no fins, and many didn’t have their heads. There were many juvenile species.” Adds Muñoz: “I don’t think these horrible images will ever be erased from my mind or the minds of others who were there.”

In all, the reefer contained 7,639 shark carcasses—including juveniles and 432 fetal sharks from pregnant females—and had room for thousands more. It was the biggest such seizure ever in the Galápagos Marine Reserve. Muñoz was part of a team of scientists that immediately set about taking samples for subsequent analysis to determine the species involved.

Information on those tissue samples, taken from 929 sharks, underlie a study that Muñoz and 16 other scientists from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) published in the July 22 issue of the journal Nature. Led by biologist Elisa Bonaccorso, the study says the case “exemplifies how industrial fisheries are likely depleting shark populations in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean.”

Researchers determined that the samples from the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 came from 12 shark species. Three are considered vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN): the bigeye thresher (Alopias superciliosus), the smooth hammerhead (Sphyrna zygaena) and the silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis). Four are on the IUCN’s endangered list: the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), the pelagic thresher (Alopias pelagicus), the shortfin mako (Isurus oxyrinchus) and the grey reef shark (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos). And two are listed as critically endangered: the scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) and the oceanic whitetip (Carcharhinus longimanus). The most numerous were silky sharks, oceanic whitetips, scalloped hammerheads, pelagic threshers and blue sharks. Of the oceanic whitetips and silky sharks, 96% and 86%, respectively, were immature.

Destructive taste for fins
Scientists say widespread shark fishing, driven in large part by strong consumer demand in Asia for shark fins, is the prime reason shark populations have plunged worldwide. According to the USFQ study, the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 case ought to inform marine conservation and management efforts in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. Bonaccorso says information gathered after the seizure suggests the Chinese reefer had collected sharks from fishing vessels a considerable distance from the Galápagos. The reefer then appears to have sailed through the Galápagos Marine Reserve to collect the catches of fishing boats arrayed around the edges of the larger, 200-nautical-mile Ecuadorian exclusive economic zone ringing the archipelago.

“These types of vessels pick up sharks from smaller boats as they go along,” says Bonaccorso, pointing out that every year an enormous Chinese fishing fleet scours the waters just outside the Galápagos exclusive economic zone in July and August.

She cites a report that the technology platform Global Fishing Watch published on Aug. 28, 2017, drawing on automatic identification system (AIS) ship-monitoring data. The data showed that during Aug. 5-7 of that year, the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 met four Chinese-flagged longline fishing vessels 1,700 nautical miles from the Galápagos and sailed within 30 meters of them for 12 hours. “These long encounters at sea suggest that the transfer of substantial cargo was possible,” Global Fishing Watch said in its study. “The AIS data doesn’t show another meeting or potential or probable fishing activity during the trip.”

But the fact that the hold contained grey reef sharks, which are not found in the open sea, leads Bonaccorso to believe that the vessels that transferred their catch to the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 had fished inside the Ecuadorian exclusive economic zone, which they are ostensibly prohibited from doing.

The longliners are registered with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, an international body that oversees management of tuna and other fisheries in the eastern Pacific. The reefer is not, so transfers from the former to the latter would be illegal. “The sharks are not from the Galápagos—they were caught much farther west and north,” says Bonaccorso. “The Global Fishing Watch study demonstrates the vessel did not stop in the [Galápagos] Marine Reserve, but crossed it instead.”

High-profile trial
The transit nevertheless violated Ecuadorian law, which prohibits vessels from entering the Galápagos reserve without permission and does not allow transport of protected species through reserve waters. After a precedent-setting trial on the Galápagos island of San Cristóbal, the reefer’s captain and 19 crew members were sentenced in 2019 to one to three years in prison. Ecuador confiscated the reefer and levied a US$6.1 million fine for harming protected species—a penalty the reefer’s Chinese owners have paid, officials say.

The USFQ study adds fuel to calls for major expansions of marine protected areas—a move scientists say is needed in particular to shield the world’s migratory marine species. (See "Case builds for bigger Galápagos Reserve" —EcoAméricas, June 2021.)


“Year after year, large fishing fleets position themselves at the edge of countries’ reserves and exclusive economic zones to take advantage of the [marine] species that in many cases are migratory and don’t comprehend the political boundaries we humans establish,” says Juan Manuel Guayasamín, a USFQ study coauthor. “There is a very strong commercial incentive in the Asian market for shark fins. To try to change that is very difficult, but we can enlarge marine reserves and connect them, for example by creating a corridor between Cocos Island in Costa Rica and the Galápagos, which is a route used by many marine species.”