The oceans just got a little safer for sharks. Fishermen must bring their shark catches to shore with fins still attached, the US fisheries service has decided.

The new rule, put forward last week, aims to prevent fishermen from slicing fins off vulnerable species and discarding the rest at sea.

“Finning”, as the practice is known, is illegal in the US and elsewhere, but the ban is difficult to enforce. Right now, fishermen may land piles of fins separate from shark bodies, so long as the fins weigh less than 5% of the total catch.

Shark meat fetches much lower prices than do fins, which are the main ingredient in the prized . The discrepancy encourages cheating as it is hard to identify the species of a shark based solely on its fins.

“They keep the fins of every shark they catch and then fill the hold with bodies of smaller sharks,” says marine ecologist Stuart Sandin of the in La Jolla, California. “In essence, they are double dipping.”

The new rule, which will come into effect in time for the shark-fishing season in June, is part of a plan to help badly overfished populations of sharks recover. It will only protect sharks until 2012, when fisheries managers will reevaluate the stocks.

A measure to permanently require that sharks be landed intact was introduced to the US Congress last week. The European Union is also considering similar measures to enforce the ban on finning.

Endangered species – Learn more about the conservation battle in our comprehensive special report.

Ship captains setting sail will soon have an extra kind of forecast to check – the likelihood of whales.

Satellite predictions of where whales are likely to be will help ships avoid the area, and so reduce the chance of striking a whale or snagging one in fishing nets.

The forecast will be particularly important for finding – and avoiding – critically endangered , which were hunted nearly to extinction in the North Atlantic and have failed to recover.

So many animals have been struck by ships or entangled in fishing gear that wildlife managers are desperate to keep whales and humans apart. Fewer than 400 right whales remain.

of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Portland, US, has helped develop the satellite detection method, and described it at the , which ended March 7.

Plankton feast

The technique uses satellite measurements of sea temperature, and images of chlorophyll, which indicate the concentrations of phytoplankton in different parts of the ocean.

Together the measurements can predict when and where a particular type of zooplankton, called a copepod, will hatch and grow to edible size. Across the Gulf of Maine right whales gather at dense patches of copepods to feed.

Record says that if you can find the copepods, you can find the whales. Right now, managers use airplanes to spot them, but these flights can only sample a small fraction of the gulf. Satellites take in the entire basin.

Using a computer model that combines the satellite information with that of typical patterns of currents in the gulf allows conservation managers to predict where dense patches of copepods will form, says physical oceanographer Bruce Monger of Cornell University, New York, who helped to develop the model.

Improving forecasts

Ships towing nets have confirmed that the whale forecast works, and sightings of whales also match up with the predicted locations of their prey, Monger and Record both report.

As a start, the team has of when the whales will first arrive in the south channel of the gulf this spring, based on when the first batch of copepods will mature, says Andrew Pershing, who is leading the project.

Eventually they plan to link in data from the satellite soon after it flies over and plug the information into a model that includes detailed forecasts of the currents and eddies in the gulf. That will allow them to say with greater precision where the whales are likely to be found.

Rumours of the existence of such markets have floated around for years, says wildlife biologist Justin Brashares of the University of California, Berkeley. Confirmation came from a chance encounter with a taxi driver from Ghana two years ago. When asked if he missed eating bushmeat, the driver said, “I don’t, really.” He then offered to show Brashares a market in a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, where bushmeat is sold.

“I was shocked that open markets sell large quantities of African bushmeat in major cities outside of Africa,” Brashares says.

Starting with his initial contact, Brashares has recruited 15 volunteers, expatriates from west Africa to visit illegal markets in Paris, Brussels, London, New York, Montreal, Toronto and Chicago. A market in Los Angeles has just been added to the list.

Two volunteers separately recorded the amount of bushmeat for sale at one sample location in each city. Just over 6000 kilograms of meat moves through these seven markets each month, Brashares told the Society for Conservation Biology when it met in San Jose, California, on 28 June. This probably underestimates the international trade, itself only a tiny fraction of the wild meat hunted in Africa, most of which is eaten locally. Primate meat makes up a larger share of what is sold overseas compared with markets in west and central Africa.

“I have 27 records of chimpanzee and gorilla parts being sold in the markets,” Brashares told New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. “In each case it was not a complete body, but a hand, leg or, in two cases, a head.” Guenon monkeys and baboon species appear to be a big part of the trade, he says. Small antelopes called duikers are the most commonly sold animal, and the rest of the trade is made up of rodents, reptiles and birds.

“Bushmeat is part of a luxury trade. African nationals could buy a filet mignon in London for the price of a baboon”

Bushmeat is often concealed beneath legal shipments of smoked or dried fish, but it is difficult to say how much is imported because customs officials in the US and the UK lump all illegal meat together in their reports. The sellers don’t distinguish between different species, even in the markets in Africa, and there is a good proportion that Brashare’s volunteers can’t identify.

“The bushmeat trade is huge and supports thousands of people in Africa,” says Glyn Davies, director of conservation for the Zoological Society of London, who pointed out that bushmeat traders are occasionally arrested in London. He suggests that cane rats and duikers, for example, which live near farms, could possibly be harvested sustainably to support local people. “But that is very different to harvesting large mammals such as great apes and elephants,” he says. “It would be very hard for that to be sustainable.”

Davies says that central governments in Africa need to be made aware of the millions of dollars being spent on the parallel economy of the bushmeat trade, and they need to work with the forestry industry to regulate hunting at the critical forest frontier. People in the know keep the international markets relatively buoyant, but the demand isn’t driven by need. Prices for bushmeat are higher than for legal meat.

“It’s part of what is clearly a luxury trade,” says Brashares. “They could go and buy a filet mignon in London for what they’re paying for baboon.”