A pirated version of Blue Sphere Media’s Unnatural Selection – Shark Finning on the Frontier video recently popped up over on YouTube. I hadn’t seen this video before, so I tracked the original down through Blue Sphere Media’s website and their Vimeo channel. The video seen below features some powerful imagery of finned sharks. From a production standpoint, the video gets an A+. Unfortunately, the video suffers from “magic number syndrome” (both the “100 million” and “90% decline” estimates make appearances in the video). The footage in the video alone is enough to make a strong message about shark finning, but when accompanied by “statistics” that have no scientific evidence behind them, the message becomes diluted. The problem of shark finning is real, as evidenced by the footage in the video, so why not use some “real” numbers (not to be confused with the real numbers you learned about in 5th grade during Mrs. Walker’s math class) to accompany this footage?

Warning: Video contains footage of discarded finned shark carcasses and severed shark fins.