Armed with a clip board and wearing bright yellow waders, Rima Jabado looked the part of the government inspector at the Dubai fish market as workers sawed the fins off hundreds of dead sharks from Oman and bagged them for export to Asian restaurants. But the 33-year-old Lebanese-Canadian doctoral student was not chatting with fisherman on the market's slippery floors and jotting down notes to monitor the lucrative and largely unregulated trade that has decimated stocks of certain sharks, but rather to document what species are being caught in the waters across the Persian Gulf. The government will not react unless we give them actual data," said Jabado, as she raced to take genetic samples from the sharks before their carcasses were carted off and fins auctioned to the highest bidder.

Shark finning hits gulf hard. (2012, October 25). Manila Bulletin, p. B-9.