The trade in plates provides much-needed additional income. They wanted gill plates, which are in the head.” “Sometimes fishers used to cut off their heads and toss them out in the seas, because they thought that buyers wanted the meat,” says Daniel Fernando, the co-founder of the Blue Resources Trust, a non-profit marine research institution. This meant fishers used to release manta and devil rays back to the sea, but the lucrative gill plate trade has changed that. Most Sri Lankans don’t eat them, though some add dried ray meat to curry there’s little to no demand for the fresh meat. Instead, the rays get entangled in gillnets used to catch yellowfin tuna, billfish and sailfish. Sri Lanka fishers don’t specifically target mobulids. Meanwhile, the number of mobulids being caught continues to grow, with India, Indonesia and China the biggest culprits, feeding a thriving trade centred in Guangzhou, China, and Hong Kong. Most mobulid species are classed as endangered, which means – according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s criteria – their populations has reduced by between 50% and 70% in the past decade. Their sizes are also declining, the study says. A recent study showed that more mobulid rays are caught in Sri Lanka alone than the annual global catch across large industrial purse seine fisheries (huge operations that use curtain-like nets to scoop up marine life by the tonne). Small-scale fisheries across Sri Lanka kill manta and devil rays (collectively known as mobulids), including endangered and vulnerable species, just to export their gill plates. The demand for gill plates has generated a sprawling cottage industry. The conservation charity Manta Trust calls these gill-plate concoctions “a pseudo-remedy” that has “no basis in medical science”. The growing demand for ray gill plates stems from market vendors using them to make soup that they tout a remedy for various health issues. “We heard they sell it to the Chinese because they eat them,” he says.ĭried gill plates are indeed often sold in medicine and dried seafood markets across east Asia, but are not used in traditional Chinese medicine. He has only a vague idea what happens to them afterwards. It seems a high price, but Lakshan (who gave only his first name out of concern for his trade) needs 5kg of fresh gill plates for every kilo of dried ones. Then he sells them to another trader for as much as $130 (£104) per kilo. In a courtyard across from the market, Lakshan dries the gill plates on a corrugated iron board. Instead, he’s after the gill plates: cartilage that helps manta and devil rays filter out microorganisms in ocean waters. He doesn’t want the ray’s meat, which most Sri Lankans don’t eat.
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