Costa Rica said said on Monday that it will support the conservation listing of all proposed shark and ray species at the Convention of Migratory Species meeting later this month. Over 5,000 people signed a petition calling on Costa Rica, where shark poaching has been prevalent, to support greater shark protections at the international meeting.
In 2013, FERN reporters Shannon Service and Maria Finn visited the Cocos Island in Costa Rica to cover illegal shark-finning, the “notorious practice of catching a shark, cutting off its fins and throwing the rest of the body, alive, back into the water,” wrote Service. The fins were going for big prices in places like Hong Kong, where shark fin soup is a delicacy. Thirty tons of fins were exported to Asia for the dish, reported Finn. A third of all open-ocean shark species are threatened with extinction.