On December 20, 2010 Congress passed the Shark Conservation Act. This Act prevents shark finning in US waters. Shark finning is the act of removing the fins of a shark and leaving the remaining carcass in the sea. This is a major step towards protecting sharks because annually 100 million sharks are killed commercially worldwide, while tens of millions of sharks are killed just for the fins. The result of these acts towards sharks puts 50 out of the 307 species of sharks on the vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered lists. Only the white, whale and basking sharks are protected under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). Sharks represent the greatest percentage of threatened marine species on the IUCN Red list of threatened species. The threat sharks face from humans is drastically hurting them; they are vulnerable to pressure from humans because of the sharks slow growth rate and reproduction potential. Many of the shark populations have declined to the point where they are unable to perform their role as top predators in the ecosystem, causing drastic and possibly irreversible damage to the oceans.
