This June customs officers in Hong Kong intercepted eight cartons supposedly containing frozen fish fillets on their way from Mexico to Vietnam. The packages, they found, also included 149 kilograms (about 330 pounds) of dried fish bladders suspected to come from protected totoaba, a critically endangered fish species that swims in the Gulf of California.
Officials estimated the smuggled fish bladders — organs that help with buoyancy and that are known as fish maw after they’ve been dried — had a street value of more than $3 million.
The international trade in fish maw, which can come from many fish species, is responsible for the bycatch deaths of countless other marine organisms, including the vaquita, one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals, whose population currently numbers fewer than 10.
Fish maw is one of the most valuable seafood products in the world, and that demand is spurring increased catch of a growing number of large and threatened fish species, according to a 2020 report from TRAFFIC, a nongovernmental organization addressing wildlife trade.
Scientists and conservationists continue to raise the alarm about huge increases in the catch of these species, which has mostly gone unrecognized, unreported, and unregulated.
A Rapid Expansion
Though the fish maw trade is expanding in terms of the numbers of species and countries involved, it has a long history of human consumption.
“In prepared form, it’s used primarily by those from Southern China,” says Dr. Yvonne Sadovy, the emeritus chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Groupers and Wrasses Specialist Group. “It’s a seafood delicacy long used for special family and business dining occasions. In more recent years it’s been heavily promoted for health and beauty uses because of its collagen content. In the past it’s even been used in many countries … for beer and wine clarification.”
Experts now say the fish maw trade, which is poorly studied and mostly unregulated, is exploding in size.
“Our situation now is similar to the early days of the shark fin trade,” says Stan Shea, the marine program director of BLOOM Association Hong Kong. “In the past nobody understood the scale of the shark fin trade, volumes and values, which countries and territories were involved. It’s the same for fish maw now.”
Indeed, as successful conservation regulations for the shark fin trade come into effect in Hong Kong and elsewhere, the fish maw trade seems to be replacing much of it.
“I don’t remember seeing a lot of fish maw in the dried seafood markets that I visited during the 1990s and 2000s, but it’s striking that today fish maw is visually far more abundant than shark fin,” says Sarah Fowler, the scientific advisor for the Save Our Seas Foundation. Fowler also pointed out that the fish maw trade involves lots of the same trade routes as the old shark fin trade and has a similarly devastating impact on both target species and bycatch species.
Dangerous Effects on the Wild
Many of the fish species targeted for their swim bladders — especially large fish — are themselves overfished or endangered, including sturgeon, totoaba, and bahaba. As with the shark fin trade, rarer species are more valuable.
“A century ago just a handful of species were used for the fish maw trade,” Dr. Sadovy tells me. “Today all of those original species are of conservation concern, and the number of species used in the trade has greatly increased.”
Dried fish maw from many species for sale at a fish market in Hong Kong.
Photo credit: Animal Welfare Institute, courtesy Sue Fisher
And the gillnets used to catch these fish are indiscriminate, resulting in bycatch issues similar to those facing the vaquita. In a paper titled “Maw Money Maw Problems,” scientists documented bycatch of critically endangered sawfish, sea turtles, and dugongs in nets targeting fish for their fish maws in Papua New Guinea. In Bangladesh scientists documented bycatch of critically endangered sharks and rays.
The lack of data on this trade and its impacts is itself a conservation problem, making it difficult to target effective conservation interventions.
“Because the huge increase in demand for fish maw is still very recent, the impacts of new fisheries popping up all over the world to supply this booming trade have mostly not been assessed,” Fowler tells me.
First Steps to Address This Problem
Even with data gaps, what we know so far is alarming and shows a clear need for urgent conservation intervention. And the scope of the trade suggests a clear path for intervention: The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
“Given that the trade involves over 110 countries that we know of, CITES is very important to help regulate it,” Stan Shea told me.
While CITES only hosts a Conference of the Parties every three years, this July, its Animals Committee met to discuss the agenda for the next COP. In March a coalition of environmental nonprofits called on the committee to establish a working group focusing on documenting the fish maw problem in support of future solutions, and to put the fish maw trade on their agenda as a standing item.
“The Animals Committee can play an important role in improving scientific knowledge of maw fisheries and their impacts,” says Sadovy. “Several IUCN specialist groups are ready to contribute to the proposed working group to compile information on the species in trade, trade dynamics, and conservation status.”
Many of the scientists’ requests — including establishing a formal working group to focus on fish maw issues and putting the fish maw trade on the agenda as a standing agenda item — did not receive enough support at the Animals Committee meeting.
But one of the requested action items — asking major fish maw fishing nations to document what species are targeted and their conservation status, along with trade routes — was successful.
The experts I spoke with were broadly happy with the outcome.
Meanwhile, the calls for change proceed on other fronts. A recent TRAFFIC report called for the creation of a dedicated World Customs Organization code for fish maw, training for law enforcement, and drafting national-level conservation legislation to regulate the fish maw trade.
We still have a long way to go before we can fully understand and regulate the fish maw trade, but the experts interviewed with this article agree that it’s now a race to protect affected fish populations and species.
“There is a real need to manage fisheries which heavily target species for their maw,” Sadovy says, “because these include some of the most valuable and vulnerable exploited fish species in the world.”
Previously in The Revelator:
Saving the Vaquita: New Promises and New Threats