A crew member of the Fu Yuan Leng 999 revealed that the more than 6,000 endangered sharks at the center of the 2017 Galapagos shark killing scandal were caught by Fuzhuo Honglong which at the time denied its involvement.
Huang Zhiqiang, a crew of the Fu Yuan Leng 999 who revealed the information, came back to China after being imprisoned in Ecuador for a year, according to a report from the Caixin Global.
In Aug. 2017, twenty Chinese ship crews were sentenced to jail and were fined a $5.9 million fine for illegal fishing off the Galapagos Islands. The vessel was caught transporting 300 tons of endangered sea species and hammerhead sharks. Investigators were puzzled as to why a storage ship without fishing equipment was carrying a massive volume of catch.
At the time, both the Ecuadorian authorities and China's Ministry of Agriculture concluded that fishing vessels that carried Taiwanese flags caught the endangered animals and were only being transported by the Fu Yuan Leng 999. Caixin Global, on the other hand, had run a report suspecting that Fuzhuo Honglong was behind the controversy.
Indeed, Huang now confessed that pointing the blame on Taiwanese boats was part of a cover-up to protect the involvement of Fuzhuo Honglong.
Aside from the endangered species included in the catch and fishing being illegal at the islands where it happened, the case became a global controversy as the Galapagos Islands was significant to the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by Natural Selection.
Pictures that emerged from the arrest of the ship and its crew showed that the sharks' fins were removed, an indication that the catch was meant to be sold to suppliers for businesses that make shark fin soup which is a famous delicacy across Asia, particularly in China.
The shark fin business, however, has been the subject of protests among animal activists and conservationist. People against it described the harvest of fins "barbaric" as catchers would normally cut the animals' fins and throw them back at sea, leaving them suffocating, unable to move, until they die.
The fins on average only comprised less than 5 percent of the animals' total body weight but the fins were harvested for their monetary value. Shark fins can be sold up to $650 per kilogram. Fins harvested from Whale Sharks can be sold for $20,000 a piece while fins from Basking Sharks can be sold for a whopping $50,000. While the sharks' bodies could also be sold, they only fetched a measly $0.85 per kilogram.
