Workers clean and dry small sharks and rays on the beach in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. Booming demand for shark fins in Asia (which sold for almost $500 per kilogram in 2013) and shark meat in Europe in the late 1980s led both local artisanal and international industrial fleets to target shark species. Since many sharks don’t reach sexual maturity until their teens, shark populations plummeted, and by the early 2000s, researchers estimated that 20 percent of the sixty-nine shark and ray species commonly caught in West African waters were threatened, while some had disappeared altogether. These Malian workers told Steinmetz that the fins of these small sharks were going to China for soup, and the meat and heads would be sent to Nigeria.
