Every year, around 73 million sharks are killed for the shark fin industry. This trade is driving all sorts of sharks like blue sharks, soupfin sharks, shortfin makos, bull sharks, hammerhead sharks, thresher sharks, and more to extinction. Between 2000 and 2011 around 16,815 METRIC TONS of shark fins were traded globally. This shows that it's a very popular industry, and it especially is in Southeastern Asia, as shark fins go in shark fin soup, a delicacy for fancy restaurants. And because most sharks have long lifespans and reproduce slowly, it turns out that they are actually being killed 30% faster than they can reproduce. But why do sharks matter? Sharks are a very important part of their ecosystems and the food chain because they are usually on top. If you take away the main predator from the food chain, the thing the main predator eats grows in population, so there is now more of it to hunt the next thing down the food chain. Now the whole ecosystem is wrecked and unbalanced! You can see this phenomenon happening especially in coral reefs. Typical reef sharks might hunt bigger fish that hunt small grazers. Those small grazers keep the algae levels under control and help sort-of deweed the reef. But if you take the sharks away, the big fish are left unchecked, so they eat all the small fish and there is no one left to take care of the reef. Now, I think that we shouldn't just ban the shark fin trade but also help the families that are depending on the income from the shark fin trade and give them new ways to also make more money than they did. Programs are emerging to help those families, and the governments of different countries should fund them.