Global Fish Crisis | Still Waters, National Geographic Magazine: EU Worker Cuts Shark Fins on Factory Ship in Senegal

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Every two hours a bell rings… Day and night… the 20 Senegalese sailors go out pull in the net, dump it into a dumpster contraption and then run downstairs to clean and sort the fish…  They are frozen and boxed and ready to ship when they hit port of Dakar. Sharks are Finned and babies sent over with by catch.

From Paul Salopek story, Fade to Blue:

But as global fish populations shrivel–and especially since the richest nations have sealed off their coastlines inside 200-mile “exclusive economic zones”–the crews of thousands of steel-hulled trawlers from the developed world have taken to raiding or buying their way into the waters of the poor. The result: a showdown over scarce protein in which some 20 million ragged traditional fishermen such as Rodriguez are the inevitable losers. “We are witnessing the last buffalo hunt at sea,” says Reg Watson, a researcher at the University of British Columbia who has helped document steep declines in the world’s key seafood stocks since the 1960s. “Our southern oceans are becoming the new Wild West.”