Men's Journal

Each year in the Galápagos Islands thousands of sharks are mutilated and thrown back in the water, all for a bowl of stringy soup. Jonathan Miles teams up for an investigation with the leading crusader against the booming illegal wildlife trade.

By Jonathan Miles

There’s blood in the water, and Peter Knights can smell it. It’s 5:30 am and 42- year-old Knights, a lean Englishman with sun-ruddied skin and close-cropped hair the color of a dirty beach, is pacing the docks, talking nonstop to keep from stewing in frustration, checking his watch, then rechecking his watch as the sea unblackens with the first silver hints of dawn. A week earlier in San Francisco, where he now makes his home, he’d held his 20-month-old daughter Julia aloft in his arms and tried to explain why her father was leaving. “Daddy’s going away to help the sharks,” he told her, because there was shark blood in the water, and lots of it, and Daddy’s job— no, Daddy’s life— is about stanching such blood flow. But there’s no stanching right now, here in the Galápagos Islands, those weird crannied stones that fell out of God’s pockets into the Pacific Ocean 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador.

Knights is a founder and the executive director of WildAid, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that provides, in the words of its mission statement, “direct protection for wildlife in danger.” Some of the dozen boats lolling in the harbor of the Parque Nacional Galápagos were donated to the park by WildAid, which operates with a staff of 15 and a $2.5 million annual budget. But all of them, save one 18-foot fiberglass coastal patrol boat that Knights is waiting to board, are currently out of commission. One has a busted pump. Another is being refitted on the mainland. Another had been on loan to the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and is now back. And the captain is AWOL so far this morning.

At 6 am a Zodiac motors to the dock from one of the anchored patrol boats, carrying a tired-looking park ranger and an expressionless woman clad in a black miniskirt slit perilously high up the side. She wobbles alone up the gangplank in black stiletto heels, then clicks past an ebony pile of sleeping marine iguanas clumped together for warmth. The man motors the Zodiac back toward the patrol boat without so much as a wave. Knights sighs. The shark poachers, he figures, have been out at sea for hours already, slicing fins away with machetes, dumping the shark carcasses overboard like victims of a gangland hit. Soon there’ll be no trace of them: The nets or the longlines will be pulled up, the poachers will flee, the finless carcasses will sink, the blood will dilute and drift away. Only an unseen absence, an empty blue yawn, will remain.

Knights and his local field program supervisor Godfrey Merlen are close to packing up and bagging the day’s patrol when the captain arrives at 6:15 am, red-eyed and apologetic. He overslept. Then the five of us—Angel Reina, the captain; Knights; Merlen; a photographer; and myself—pile into the boat, which could easily be mistaken from a distance for one of the fiberglass vessels that local poachers use for checking their nets and lines. After picking up an additional crewman we head south from Santa CruzIsland, the archipelago’s main population center and the site of the park’s headquarters, toward the island of Floreana. Historically favored by buccaneers and whalers, who long ago stripped it of its native tortoise population, Floreana is now a target for poachers preying on the hammerheads and other sharks that cluster in its coastal waters.

“It’s a bit late in the morning, but hopefully we’ll come across someone pulling up a net or winching a longline,” Knights shouts over the engine’s whine, struggling, as we all are, to maintain his balance in the choppy, whitecap-frosted seas. “It’s really the only way to capture them—in the act, with fins on board. The problem is that they can see us when we see them, so chances are they’ll dump their fins and take off.” Or, more rarely, stand and fight: Poachers have been known to fire flare guns at rangers, and several years back a ranger was shot in the abdomen when he pursued two poachers onto land and chased them into a cave. Usually an armed Ecuadoran naval officer accompanies the rangers on patrol, but we’re without such backup today. The jolting motion of the boat makes peering through binoculars almost impossible. “It’s a tough game,” Knights understates.

It’s at this point, with the edges of Floreana sharpening into view, that I have to remind myself: All this, the boats and the guns and the blood and the foreign involvement, and all the things I haven’t yet told you about, the web of corruption and midnight death threats; a busted-up baby’s crib; nine giant tortoises with their throats slit; sullen, chain-smoking whores imported from the mainland; impassioned pleas from Jackie Chan and Yao Ming; the gray carcasses lying in piles upon the seafloor; and that great blue emptiness spreading like cancer through the world’s oceans—all this for a bowl of soup.

Shark-fin soup does not taste like shark. It tastes like chicken stock and whatever the chef adds to the stock: mushrooms, ginger, dried scallops, chicken, pork, scallions. The shark fin—which before going into the soup has been dried, blanched, scraped, dried again, and soaked to remove the meat’s pungent, urine-like odor—contributes bulk to the bowl, strands of gelatinous, protein-laden but entirely flavorless cartilage. For a couple of millennia this soup was a regional delicacy in the Guangdong province of China, loosely akin to the sherried turtle soup served in old-guard New Orleans restaurants, a steaming luxury for a rich and powerful few who, charmed by its rareness and exclusivity, imbued it with all manner of mythical virtues. It’s said to nourish the blood, strengthen the waist, improve a woman’s complexion, and make a soft penis hard.

It does not do so without consequences. In the time it took you to read the preceding paragraph approximately 120 sharks will have died, according to the Switzerland-based Shark Foundation. By the time you finish this article the total will be roughly 2,000. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 100 million sharks, skates, and rays die each year. And as the number of species used to produce shark-fin soup appears to have increased, the populations of a number of species have declined radically. For some species the prognosis is bleaker: great whites, down by 79 percent; thresher sharks, down 80 percent; hammerheads, down a whopping 89 percent. Those last three numbers refer only to Atlantic sharks. “If we’re looking at massive declines there [in the Atlantic],” a program officer with the World Conservation Union told BBC News, “it’s going to be as bad or even worse in other areas.” In a 2001 WildAid report detailing the global threats to sharks Knights arrived at this grim conclusion: “Sharks are likely to be in the first round of marine extinctions caused by human activity.”

And this is why I’ve come, per Knights’s invitation, to the Galápagos Islands—or more specifically the Galápagos Marine Reserve, a 51,351-square-mile teardrop-shaped expanse of blue Pacific that, as part of the park, was officially cordoned off from large-scale commercial fishing in 1998. (Artisanal fishing, meaning low-tech methods and limited catches, is still permitted.) Ecuador, to which the Galápagos belong, along with at least 60 other nations, has outlawed shark finning in the last two years.

Owing to Charles Darwin’s world-upturning visit here in 1835, the Galápagos Islands have long been sacred ground for biologists and wilderness advocates. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, they’re heavily protected, intensely regulated, and earnestly watched. A stroll down Charles Darwin Avenue and the sidestreets of Puerto Ayora, the islands’ main town, takes you past satellite offices of the World Wildlife Fund, WildAid, and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (whose founder, the bombastic PaulWatson, was on my flight from the mainland). The Galápagos are not only a fabled magnet for naturalists and eco-tourists, they’re also a major draw for sharks, lured here by the convergence of three fish-streaked oceanic currents. And the sharks, of course, bring shark poachers. If the Galápagos, as Darwin famously contended, are a microcosm of life on earth, then it might not be a stretch to view them as a microcosm of the worldwide struggle to save what’s left of the planet’s sharks and of endangered wildlife in general.

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It’s mid-morning a couple of days later, warm and breezy at the Charles Darwin Research Station, on the island of Santa Cruz. Lonesome George, the last of a breed known as the Pinta Island tortoises, is hunkered down in his enclosure at the station, carrying the full weight of his species on his shell. When the 70-some-yearold tortoise dies, his species vanishes with him. A steady stream of tourists stops to peer at him, to view extinction in action, then moves on. Inside the headquarters of the Parque Nacional Galápagos a group of 20 park rangers crowds into a drab meeting room where Knights is waiting, his laptop hooked to a projector that’s beaming his desktop menu onto a wall.

These rangers have tough jobs, they say. They’re not allowed to carry weapons, though the poachers they’re supposed to arrest are always armed, with machetes at least; some of them avoid going out in public at night, due to local hostility. (When angry fishermen surrounded a disco where several rangers had gone for the evening, the rangers were forced to spend the night locked inside, for their own safety.) Their pay is low, and, because of the tragicomic manner in which the Ecuadoran government has appointed park directors (12 have come and gone since 2002), their jobs are often precarious. Knights wants them to know that someone, somewhere, is paying attention to their work. He plays a video for them, a stylish PSA produced by WildAid that recently ran on Chinese television.

“There’s the Galápagos,” Knights notes, as a hammerhead shark flits across the screen. The face of action star Jackie Chan appears on the wall, like a hologram shot from the laptop, and WildAid’s local program manager, Marcel Bigue, translates Chan’s words for the rangers: “When the buying stops,” says Chan, “the killing can, too.” Knights has corralled a major swath of Asian celebrities for spots such as these, including NBA star Yao Ming. As he explains to the rangers, “People wouldn’t go out and fin sharks if no one wanted to buy shark-fin soup. Just like the drug trade, it’s difficult to stop the trade without stopping the demand. You guys are here on the front lines of what is effectively a war on wildlife.”

It’s a large and loaded word, war, but it’s justified. The illegal wildlife trade, at an estimated annual value of $10 billion, ranks just behind arms and drug smuggling on the global black market. And that makes Knights something of an eco-warrior.

“This guy,” an American expat says to me about Knights, when Knights and I run into him in Puerto Ayora, “when I met him, he was just this guy who dropped out of the sky on occasion to do some good things. Then one day I open the New York Times and there he is in Cambodia, holding a Kalashnikov.”

“Not true,” Knights demurs. “I’ve never held a gun in my life.”

“Well, you hang out with people who do,” comes the rejoinder.

Knights does indeed hang out with people who carry guns–like the park rangers, some of them  ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers whom WildAid trained in the battle against elephant and tiger poachers in southern Cambodia, or the Russian lawmen WildAid assisted in protecting the Siberian tiger. He’s also been around those who, if they knew better, might take aim directly at him, like some of the illegal wildlife traders whose trafficking rings he infiltrated as an undercover “eco-spy” in the 1990s.

Knights started as a Greenpeace volunteer in the late ‘80s, wanting to save the whales like everyone else, and it was through Greenpeace that he hooked up with the Environmental Investigation Agency, a London nonprofit dedicated to penetrating and exposing the illegal wildlife trade. “It was clear that they knew more about the ivory trade, for instance, than any of the conservation groups,” Knights says. He worked for the EIA for five years, posing as a buyer or journalist while surreptitiously documenting, in dozens of countries, the trade in wild birds, rhino horns, bear gall bladders, and tiger bones.

In 1994, while working undercover as a tiger-bone dealer in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Knights found himself in one particularly sketchy situation. Two sources took him and his partner, a cameraman, into a labyrinth of back alleys and confronted him, demanding to know if he was an environmentalist. Knights denied it. “Those guys are ruining our business,” he fibbed. The dealers loosened up and fetched an entire tiger skeleton and divulged their trade routes. Knights’s cameraman captured the whole exchange.

In 1999 Knights and three others, one a fellow EIA alumnus, formed WildAid and quickly found themselves on the leading edge of a new movement in environmental activism—commissioning scientific research, issuing dire reports, and lobbying governments to act (the old green tack) has its merits, according to this new mind-set, but ultimately it’s just hand-wringing.

Knights is a pragmatic rather than emotional advocate for nature. When he talks about his dreams to bring his daughter to the Galápagos in 25 years, to swim with whale sharks, he speaks with the calm, dry conviction of a father talking about safeguarding his child’s inheritance, this world that he leaves for her. “Everything we lose in nature is a part of our humanity that goes missing,” he says. “What’s the most scarce resource in the universe? Life. And here we are, knocking it out in one way or another.”

WildAid reckons that its work in Asia has slashed poaching in key parks by 70 percent, and that 17,000 animals in Cambodia alone— elephants, tigers, and Malayan sun bears among them— have been saved by its programs. It claims to have reduced the number of Phnom Penh restaurants serving illegal wildlife dishes, like bear-paw soup, by 75 percent, and, through its consumer campaigns, cut shark fin consumption by 25 percent in Singapore and Taiwan and 30 percent in Thailand. Because of these successes, or perhaps owing to a sunny quirk of personality, Knights seems eternally optimistic. He’s fundamentalist in his faith in “bottom-up, common-sense solutions,” such as creating incentives for park rangers to increase busts and implementing other “Western-style management techniques.” He hopes these ideas, and savvy marketing tactics, can stave off an inevitable ecological apocalypse. “My dream is to see the illegal wildlife trade go where slavery has gone. To be so unthinkable, and so rare.”

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Six years ago Juan Chavez, the mild-mannered, gleaming-eyed director of the park service on the Galápagos island of Isabela at the time, was chased into mangrove swamps by a mob of irate fishermen. While he hid there overnight, waiting to be rescued by the Ecuadoran navy, his office and home were ransacked, looted, and basically shredded. Even his one-week-old daughter’s crib was destroyed, thrown into the street and kicked into splinters.

This wasn’t the first time that Galapagueño fishermen, who number a little more than 1,000, had resorted to violence. In 1994 Galápagos divemaster Mathias Espinosa filmed a bounty of illegally obtained sea cucumbers drying on a local politician’s roof and made the video public, which earned him death threats and midnight phone calls and forced him to walk through town for a month with a machete in his left hand and a baseball bat in his right. In 1996 fishermen slit the throats of nine endangered tortoises to vent their displeasure with fishing regulations. Two years ago some of them stormed park offices armed with Molotov cocktails and iron bars. (No one has been convicted in any of these incidents, although Chavez’s attackers are reportedly set to go to trial soon, more than six years later.)

What set the fishermen off in 2000, when they plundered Chavez’s home, was ostensibly a quota on lobsters, which, along with sea cucumbers (another purported Asian aphrodisiac), are the legal big-ticket items. But among their other demands was the opening of the shark fishery.

Not all of the islands’ fishermen are lusting for shark fins, of course. Many of them are indeed artisans, supplying the local markets with grouper, sea bass, and tuna. “It’s just a few that are involved, because it’s easy money,” says Mario Piu, the head of the park’s marine conservation unit. One ranger estimates that on the island he patrols, one-sixth of the fishermen might be full-time finners, pocketing up to $1,000 for a one-week shark trip. (A pound of dried fins, comprising about three medium-size ones, currently goes for $40, according to park officials.) As Knights says, “These are not poverty-stricken people, by Ecuadoran standards. They’re fairly well-off.”

Catching the sharks is the simple part. You put out wide-mesh, 15-by-15-centimeter (about six-inch-square) gill nets in the evening, then return the following morning. Netted sharks are usually dead upon arrival. With a machete the poachers lop off the dorsal and pectoral fins and the top of the caudal fin, then heave the corpse overboard. The meat of some shark species is perfectly edible, of course, but meat requires refrigeration and yields something like 50 cents a pound, so back it goes. Longline fishermen, using 200 or more squid-baited hooks, tend to find their catches alive. But this makes no real difference in the process. The sharks are finned alive, then dumped back into the water. Unable to swim, they drop slowly to the bottom and die.

 Smuggling the fins out is the trickier part. In the past, poachers have used tourist boats or, at times, military airplanes to ferry the contraband to the mainland. These days, officials believe, the fins are being whisked out to Ecuadoran and foreign-flagged mother ships lurking just at the edges of the marine reserve. “They’ve got fast boats, GPS, and telecommunications,” says Piu. “They’re as prepared as the park service.” From there they’re taken to the mainland (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru), then flown through the U.S. to China, Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong and distributed to Asian communities worldwide.

“There’s a mafia here,” he adds, “but all the money is coming from outside the islands. The motor of this is on the mainland.”

If Piu is right, and a finning mafia exists in the Galápagos, then its Bada Bing Club is Amazonas, a grungy Santa Cruz Island brothel more commonly called the Cuatro y Media, as it’s located four and a half  kilometers from Puerto Ayora. This is where local poachers come to unwind after a week or so at sea, and where they part with their profits. They lounge on blue love seats beneath a greenish disco ball drinking Brazilian beer while prostitutes, flown in from Guayaquil and other mainland cities, smoke listlessly at the bar.

At the peak of the sea cucumber rush, when the Islands’ fishing population increased by 500 percent,traders and fishermen used to rent out the entire Cuatro y Media—the bar, the women, everything— for go-for-broke multiday binges. Since the sea cucumber fishery petered out—the 2005 harvest yielded less than half of the quota— one might be hopefully tempted to conclude that the boomtown vibe must be waning as well. Yet a new brothel just opened down the road from the Cuatro y Media.

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The sea lions basking on a thin strand of beach on Floreana merely stare as Knights navigates his way through them, blithely curious, beautifully unafraid. The wildlife here is still trusting and tame, sweetly ignorant of human appetites. They haven’t known us long enough. Knights clambers up a lava-rocky incline at the foot of some massive cliffs festooned with old graffiti, the names of fishing boats engraved in the stone. He walks past waist-high piles of sun-bleached conch shells and other assorted remains of the scores of makeshift fishing camps this hidden beach has hosted.

“We’re looking to see if there’s anything fresh,” he says. Poachers will hunker down at campsites like these for days or even weeks while gathering their fins, which they often tuck into cracks in the lava to dry. But this site looks to have been unused for a while.

During this weeklong trip to the islands Knights hasn’t caught sign of a single poacher, despite searches on two boat patrols. It feels futile, heartbreakingly so. On Isabela, Chavez hasn’t had his patrol boat in the water for two months; it’s broken down, like so many of the park’s other vessels. A fuel shortage means that the park’s spotter plane has also been grounded. Yet even if the infrastructure to patrol the marine reserve were up and running, enforcement would be more theatrical than tangible. Seizures of fins are common (nearly 20,000 have been confiscated since the marine reserve was established in ‘98) but the poachers almost always go unpunished. Sometimes their boats are confiscated, but judges nearly always return them. Bribery — of judges, naval officers, politicians, even some rangers — is reputedly epidemic. “Everyone is dirty,” a local mediator, who helps to bridge the differences between the islands’ fishing, tourism, and scientific interests, told me. “All the sectors are corrupt.”

“The thing is,” Espinosa told me a few days earlier on Isabela, “I don’t know of a single government on the planet that’s successfully protecting sharks. Just because the Galápagos are famous, this will happen? I don’t think so. And what if we do protect them here? Once they leave, they’re gone anyway.”

He’s right. A migrating shark that leaves the ostensibly protected waters of the marine reserve is easy prey in the rest of the oceans. Despite the regulations on the books in many nations, only the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand actually manage sharks in their coastal waters. In most of the world it’s a free-for-all. The laws may be in place, but laws without enforcement are merely ink on paper, the fiction of good intentions.

The challenge is vast, yet Knights brims with contagious hope. He knows that stopping the shark poachers is only half the battle; the other half will be fought in places like China, Thailand, Las Vegas casinos, and anyplace else where shark-fin soup is on the menu. When people stop eating sharks, fishermen will stop killing them just for their fins, and the corpses will no longer sink to the bottom of the world’s oceans, trailing pink ribbons of blood like plumes of smoke.

“I mean, I can see progress,” Knights says. “Not long ago I spoke at Harvard, and after the speech a guy came up to me and said, ‘You must be having some effect because the last three weddings I’ve been to [in Asia] didn’t serve shark-fin soup.’ Which is like saying that the last three Thanksgiving dinners in America he’d attended didn’t serve turkey.”

“When I started diving here 18 years ago you could see thousands of sharks, whole walls of them,” Espinosa told me. “Now we see a few hundred. In five years maybe we’ll be lucky to see 50. But the issue is time. We’re running out of time.”

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This article originally appeared in the October 2006 issue of Men’s Journal. 

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