Captured at sea and hauled on deck, the sharks are often still alive while their fins are hacked off. Because shark meat is not considered as valuable as shark fin, the maimed animals are tossed overboard to drown or bleed to death. The process is called shark finning: a recipe for cruelty and waste.

Traditionally served at Chinese New Year’s celebrations, shark fin soup can fetch up to $100 a bowl. That’s a high price to pay for a meal harmful to your health. Sharks consume marine trash polluted with heavy metal chemicals, and shark fin analyses have shown extremely high concentrations of mercury. Poisonous to humans, mercury can cause fetal damage and infertility.

In general, sharks grow slowly, mature late and produce few young over long lifetimes, leaving them exceptionally vulnerable to overexploitation and slow to recover from depletion. As key predators, their depletion also has risks for the health of entire ocean ecosystems. For example, tiger sharks have been linked to the quality of seagrass beds through their prey, dugongs and green sea turtles, which forage in these beds. Without tiger sharks to control their prey’s foraging, an important habitat is lost.