A Coronavirus Vaccine Could Kill Half a Million Sharks, Conservationists Warn | Hacker News Reader

A Coronavirus Vaccine Could Kill Half a Million Sharks, Conservationists Warn

npr.org

110 pointspseudolus113 comments

"However, the extraction of shark squalene has been a more attractive option for producers as it can cost less and yield greater quantities than nonanimal alternatives."

Now you've got my attention. How much larger are concentrations of this substance [0] in sharks when catching sharks and extracting it from them is easier than getting it from "[...] nonanimal sources includ[ing] olive oil, sugar cane, wheat germ, bacteria and yeast."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squalene

Edit: here is some information:

"[...] deep-sea sharks are targeted for the squalene market because they have some of the highest concentrations of squalene in their livers, some taking up to 20% of their body weight", from https://www.sharkallies.com/shark-free-products/cosmetics-wh...

I don't know, but probably lower than it is in albatross vomit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stomach_oil

The squalene in question that's derived from sharks has been used for decades. I've never heard of it before. Only now I do when it could be used to save untold human lives. Really?

There's some info here, I had heard of it as a supplement:

https://examine.com/supplements/squalene/

I imagine the demand shock would be much greater given the urgency.

In any case, it’s perfectly valid to think through the implications of our actions and wonder about alternatives.

That was my thought, but it turns out cosmetics routinely kill 2-3 million sharks per year.

So instead the group is using coronavirus to bring attention to the issue. I find the ongoing cosmetics use much more disturbing, that’s a lot of sharks.

You seem to imply that the use for the vaccine is something extra-objectable but the shark protection project objects to its use in general [0].

Regarding your other statements: catching 20% more sharks than before [1] sounds actually newsworthy. Furthermore you will have heard of a negligible number of all the things in existence before, no matter how well-read you are - so not having heard about something is hardly an argument for anything.

[0] https://www.sharkallies.com/shark-free-products/cosmetics-wh...

[1] extra demand 500,000 sharks; currently caught: 2.7M sharks annually.

I have endlessly heard of the Japanese hunting sharks and whales for their soups. You'd think the cosmetics industry would have been mentioned at some point as well.

And the fine article even mentions that over 5 times the quantity of sharks are killed for the cosmetic industry.

The shark protection group objects to any use of shark derived squalene. The threat of even more sharks being killed serves as opportunity to focus attention on this ongoing issue.

Simple: ban the use for cosmetics. Should save 2 million sharks a year if those numbers are correct.

Absolutely but once you have a non-shark source for the substance, you might as well be able to replace other uses.

Looking from a different angle, I can see few valid reasons for using cosmetics:

1. Cosmetics often includes medical/dermatological products which are essential for some people.

2. Cosmetics can be used not just for "vanity" but to cover big scars and other unwanted-attention-invoking skin conditions; similar to how plastic surgery may be life-saving for some folks and enable them to live a "normal life".

3. Seeking beauty/aesthetics is not a bad thing in itself

I assume, though, most cosmetics are used for nugatory reasons, and we should always questions whether these above use cases really justify killing millions of animals.

I'm okay with killing half a million big fish to end this pandemic.

This pretty much sums up humanity's stupidity and ignorance given the origin of this pandemic.

Could you elaborate? In what way? How would you proceed?

Well, my understanding is that the virus jumped from some species, which was sold under absolutely miserable conditions in a wet market in Wuhan, to humans. I find it almost comical that someone would be completely fine with more animal exploitation given that this was the reason humans were infected in the first place.

Just like other theories, the wet market one has no evidence.

It's more of a matter of human population expanding to cover the entire surface of the earth than anything else. There's no evidence the last SARS outbreaks in China was from wet markets. Much like there's no evidence it was from wet markets this time.

Fish are very stupid animals without much brain. It is definitely worth it to kill 500k of them to help save a bunch of human lives.

Strange, all of that seems to be wrong. It was wet markets; people are not growing populations any more; it's worth it to kill ~2 million of them for cosmetics so certainly half a million to save lives is reasonable.

Excuse the ad hominem, but did you miss the food chain class in elementary school? “Very stupid” has exactly “fuck all” to do with how important they are to the ecology of the oceans. If the ocean food chain collapses, there’s no coming back from that for millennia. Like, what?

This compound is found in wheat! Wheat!

This is not an amount that will collapse any food chains.

500K fish used for human purposes is not going to deplete the ocean. Alternatives are good but right now there is reasonable justification for expediting things. We should use fish and all the other sources as well.

This is clearly rhetorical, not substantial argument. Using the same label for vaccine production, and wet markets ('exploitation' in your case) doesn't make it the same thing. From epidemiological perspective it's not even similar.

Use slightly more expensive other source of the same substance? It's like killing whales for oil just to burn it instead of using olive oil, or that stuff pumped from the ground and refined, or whatever. (as was done at various points in history)

Kinda annoying how many people take this issue to mean "kill sharks or humans will die" when it's just about money.

Would that make it too expensive for some? So inoculate just those that can afford it?

There isn't a way out to this mess that doesn't involve rethinking wealth redistribution.

Animal expoitation vs the poor... I imagine some "intellectual" will come up with a new sort intersectionalism for this... or is this just one of those externalities we keep hearing about, but of the animal rights movement instead?

Well, we all suffer if a segment of the population isn't innoculated. Suffering, disease spread, cost. And putting "intellectual" in quotes is what, and attempt to make resorting-to-science look wrong?

There's also the concern of immediate availability, i.e. if shark-derived squalene is available today and the plant-derived version takes time to scale, we can't just start using that if we want to mass-produce a vaccine very quickly.

Possibly. It's hard to know without having a detailed insight into how this works. Presumably, there's some process involved in extracting it from both animals and plant sources. (You don't just put shark liver into a vaccine.)

Someone in the know would have to provide a comparison.

> Use slightly more expensive other source of the same substance?

You're assuming money is the only issue here. If we throw money at the problem, will we be able to produce a similar solution on a similar schedule?

What about the next one?

And .... 2021, well we killed half a million big fish in a few months for a vaccine that we thought worked, but the virus has mutated and it isn’t as effective.

The big fish population had a big shock and can’t recover. They’re going extinct. Turns out they were an important part of the ecosystem and now we’ve possibly made multiple species extinct.

Yeah great job humans. You are the virus.

According to this plant based source is about 30% more expensive:

https://www.sharkallies.com/shark-free-products/squalene-adj...

It would be kinda sad, now when governments are throwing around trillions of dollars indiscriminately, to drive more species to extinction just to save a few pennies per vaccine dose.

Anyway, hopefully cosmetics use will drop while people are WFH, to offset this at least a little bit.

Of the 193 vaccines in development, 5 of them use squalene (GSK, Clover Biopharmaceuticals, Seqirus/University of Queensland/CSL, Medicago Inc. and Farmacologós veterinarios SAC/Universidad Peruana Cayetana Heredia). None of those five are among the eleven that are currently in phase 3 trials.

https://www.sharkallies.com/shark-free-products/could-squale...

There are more than ten vaccines in mid-to-late trial stages. Maybe some use this substance, maybe none of them do. The article doesn't tell us. It would seem without that information, the rest of this content is useless.

Just ban the use of this component for cosmetic purposes...

It’s more upsetting to know that over 2.7 million are killed for cosmetics. Humans truly know how to dispense misery on mass scale.

But we only hear about it when less than 1/5 of that amount _might_ be sacrificed for human health. Stinks of agenda.

Also, without context, is 500,000 a lot of sharks? How many exist in the wild? How many are needed to have a stable population? If we don't cull millions of sharks annually, what effect would that have?

And what is "shark" in this context, anyway? There are dozens of fish species, at differing levels of endangerment, colloquially referred to as "sharks".

> Stinks of agenda.

Everyone has an agenda. I don't see an agenda of conservation of our ecology as one we need to resist. Especially when their conclusion at the end is not just "Save the Sharks", but a hope that we will research other possible ingredients instead of just running with the first working prototype.

Many agendas masquerade as "conservation of our ecology" when they are none of the sort and produce no results or even the opposite of what they claim.

The fact that you like it is no reason to not look at what's behind it.

Sure, move past the innuendo and offer the theory so we can discuss. Throwing out the innuendo without any reason doesn’t help anyone.

Climate change deniers, for example, say the agenda “the redistribution of wealth“

Now we can have a discussion.

> look at what’s behind it

Oh yeah, this one has Big Shark written all over it.

The ones that produce no results are more likely to be victims of other agendas than ineffective because of their own.

agreed but the article says that nonanimal sources are more expensive than sharks. so research isn't what's needed, but rather (arguably) things like state provided incentives.

Mass-murdering sharks for cosmetics is unethical and evil. They feel the pain just like we do.

“And what is "shark" in this context, anyway?"

Many people seem to rationalize away much of the destruction that humans do to the world.

That’s probably why we will soon be drilling for oil in Alaska.

On pure utilitarian grounds, sharks are all carnivores who kill thousands of other animals over their life in horrific, painful ways.

That doesn’t mean that there’s not environmental reasons to justify shark conservation. But from the standpoint of animal suffering killing apex predators is almost certainly a net good.

The opposite has been shown to be true. For example, see the effect of wolf reintroduction upon biodiversity. They keep other populations in check which themselves would overall cause harm.

Look at the situation in the Scottish highlands. The entire landscape has changed beyond all recognition because of the loss of apex predators (wolves, bears). The deer population is massive, and it prevents forest growth and regeneration, and results in a landscape devoid of its natural biodiversity. This isn't just bad for the environment, we also suffer from related problems such as the spread of ticks spreading Lyme disease.

The same has happened with whitetail in the eastern US, and a lot of people around here are still foolish enough to get upset with the DNR when they do a cull. That the resulting venison goes to homeless shelters seems not to move these weepers over Bambi; presumably, in their coldly rational utilitarian calculus, the life of a deer exceeds in value that of a human, at least once the human's circumstances have been far enough reduced.

Yes, I'm making fun, a little. I think that's fair in this instance. Someone who has taken the time and thought to identify utilitarianism as a philosophy on which to base consequential decisions has I think no excuse for not having likewise studied ecology, and the modern history of the human role in ecosystems, to at least the minimal extent required to recognize that ecology is really complicated and humans don't understand it nearly so well as we like to think we do. When we behave as if we did, we break things that very often can't be fixed.

> The same has happened with whitetail in the eastern US, and a lot of people around here are still foolish enough to get upset with the DNR when they do a cull.

These people don’t understand that we have to manage the environment we created (removal of predatory animals that eat deer) and part of that is harvesting deer to prevent mass starvation from lack of winter food. I’d bet if you showed them footage of a deer starving to death in winter, they’d agree herd culling is more humane.

Then that would be a specific environmental consideration. The argument I was addressing was the consideration on utilitarian grounds.

It's possible that there may be second order environmental affects on the utilitarian calculus. I.e. the loss of sharks, causes enough ecosystem imbalance that it out-weights the direct suffering caused by species X. But that's specifically an empirical claim, and simply claiming that "sharks feel pain" isn't sufficient.

In general there's no reason to believe that the current ecological balance is the utilitarian optimal. Darwin selects for inclusive fitness, and doesn't give a hoot about animal suffering. Imagining that the pre-existence of a large predator population exists to improve the lives of the prey population is succumbing to the fallacy of group selection.

Nitpick: not all sharks are carnivores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnethead:

“Bonnetheads also ingest large amounts of seagrass, which has been found to make up around 62.1% of gut content mass. The species appear to be omnivorous, the only known case of plant feeding in sharks. The shark may perform this activity to protect its stomach against the spiny carapaces of the blue crab which it feeds on. A 2018 study with a carbon isotope-labelled seagrass diet found that they could digest seagrass with at least moderate efficiency, with 50±2% digestibility of seagrass organic matter, and had cellulose-component-degrading enzyme activity in their hindgut”

Funny, I thought we are apex predators. Why do you want to kill all humans? /s

seriously though, ecosystems are interdependent and predators have their place. I remember watching a documentary about white wolves on a remote isolated island keeping the local population of yaks and rabbits from eating the island clean. They are absolutely vital for that particular ecology. Similarly it is not our place to rank animals by importance, since we are as a species quite obviously imbeciles.

> Why do you want to kill all humans? /s

Well the sebaceous gland in human skin produces this organic compound called "squalene" and we want that to make vaccines and cosmetic creams. But we don't want to kill all humans: squalene production significantly slows after the age of 30, so its more about killing young humans. /s

Why do people think that humanity collectively has the same concept of ethics? What is good and bad? You seem to think every human is on the same page of what life is

Believing in moral absolutism is different from believe all people share your moral views.

Why do some people engage in straw man?

It may come as a surprise that research seems to show that sharks don't feel pain.

"Snow and his co-workers concluded that elasmobranchs lack the neuronal machinery absolutely essential for the perception of pain."

http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/topics/s_pain.htm

Today I learned! That's an interesting turn of events.

...essential for the perception of pain in humans.

At best this shows that shark pain perception has a different neurological basis to humans. We still have no idea what sharks do and don't "feel".

What about other questions, like: what does 30% price premium on plant based source of this oil translate to when it comes to cost of the final vaccine? And what are the issues of using plant based source? Is it worth it?

Shark is a wild animal that presumably doesn't want to be murdered by a human, to have their livers harvested, just because humans messed up with other animals and caused themselves to be infected with other animals' endemic viruses. I don't really know. I haven't talked to any sharks about this, just guessing.

Humanity really is misled. The production of cosmetics, which I believe is not particularly vital to anyone’s survival, could be cut by ~20% and we could manufacture the vaccine with no change in the amount of fishing of sharks. What is definitely interesting though is that I haven’t heard of this before. I wonder if it could be cosmetic product companies trying to keep things like this in the dark, similarly to how oil companies spread misinformation about fossil fuels? I don’t wish to don the tinfoil hat, but I would say it’s not all that unlikely that it is done. Information is the gold of our age, after all :)

Are these endangered sharks or a common species?

Does it change the fact that they are mass-murdered for cosmetics?

Yes, a lot. Even if you're a die hard animal rights activist, can't you see that 3.2 million deaths from a population of a hundred million (say) is a much smaller deal than 3.2 million from a population of ten million? One means possible extinction of a species, the other does not.

While I agree with you, extremists (aka die hards) tend to take very deontological stances. Almost by definition, one might argue.

If you are not an animal rights activist, it may be hard to see why preserving a species matters at all.

It seem to be of no importance. And as long as humans are concerned, it may even be the reverse, heuristically. The bigger species is (measured by total weight, for example), the more important it may be for sustaining the ecosystem.

I'm not talking about extinction. I'm talking about suffering and death on a large scale only because of cosmetics.

I agree with you, that's an unnecessary evil and should be stopped. I'm just saying there are levels of bad here:

A. suffering and death on a large scale only because of cosmetics but more sharks are born to replace those that are killed.

B. suffering and death on a large scale only because of cosmetics AND possible extinction of the species.

Both are bad, both should be stopped... But B. is worse and needs more immediate efforts to stop it.

Life is misery.

Especially with humans around

And sharkfin soup aka "seafood soup".

Thing is there will be unavoidable consequences from being at the top of the food chain. Morality will have to be relative when you live by consuming organic matter from other living things.

Tangential, but related to the surprise of finding out how shitty humans are to other species:

We slaughter 80 billion animals each year for food. On a planet of 7 billion humans, each year. Those animals only purpose is to be born, get fat, and get eaten by humans. Mostly in horrible conditions because it's cheap. We need to look into the mirror for more than just cosmetics industry.

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#number-of-animals...

@yes_man, mammals capable of same emotions that humans have, are brought into this world just so that they can be stacked on top of each other in horrid conditions for 1/10th of their natural lifespan in order to be slaughtered and fed to a species that is dying of obesity anyways.

Invest in technology to reliably reproduce the polypeptides that we are using animals to grow.

Note, for consistency, you should be equally horrified at companies like Ynsect, which are growing trillions of living creatures to be eaten by billions of other creatures:

http://www.ynsect.com/en/

Humans don't have a good track record of caring for each other, let alone other animals.

I dont understand how they reached this number. Did they just extrapolate survey of 8 creams to xx brands of creams that exist?

"An astonishing 7 out of 8 creams surveyed had animal squalene. This equals roughly 2.7 million shark lives taken a year for our cosmetics."

It reminds me of Rick and Morty episode, when they created cronenbergs from the humanity by applying cure which was a mix of different animals DNA. Shark included

> Shark Allies, a nonprofit that advocates for the protection of sharks, projects that some 500,000 sharks could be killed if a coronavirus vaccine with shark squalene proves to be effective. Already, an estimated 2.7 million sharks are killed annually for their squalene to make cosmetics, according to the group.

So, why the hell not petition harder against more frivolous uses instead? This is like going after impoverished African villagers to reduce carbon emissions when Americans are driving around in big honking vehicles.

(Probably not the best analogy. No interest in debating the necessity of vehicle ownership.)

> So, why the hell not petition harder against more frivolous uses instead?

Perhaps they did in the past but it was not newsworthy so you did not hear about that.

Approve. How many humans would die if they don't extract that substance?

There is not yet any evidence that a vaccine using shark extracts will be successful.

We might be killed tens of thousands of sharks and more for a notion that it may be beneficial and in the end we killed them all for no reason.

Neither of the two vaccines that are being used on a large space now contain it.

From the article:

> There are more sustainable squalene alternatives, said Brendl. Squalene's nonanimal sources include olive oil, sugar cane, wheat germ, bacteria and yeast.

Just think of the long term co2 savings we could make by not stopping the virus.

"Let's save the Earth by letting loads of people die"?

Breatharianism [1] would solve global warming pretty quickly, within a matter of weeks, really. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 would disappear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia

A surprising number of people hold the belief that humans should voluntarily go extinct to not destroy the planet.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movem...

Which is a facile, ludicrous notion on its face. Absent a human consciousness, what does ‘destroy the planet’ even mean?

Let’s be a bit more pragmatic about it: what are the typical characteristics of the “loads of people” that would be dying? Here’s a hint: it’s not the young and healthy.

A society that does not protect the elderly and the sick is not a place where I want to live.

OP is advocating killing half a million sharks to save the sick and elderly as something that “shouldn’t even be up for debate.” A few of us happen to disagree.

A scarier thought is that it has been hard to convince people to wear masks to save themselves, so what hope do we have of getting them to save the planet or even just some species that share it with us? (read a tweet to this effect, but didn't keep a ref)

Please, please consider your privilege first, before beying condescending about the world population.

Helping the Earth is very, very high on Maslow's pyramid, just appreciate that you are that high on it and think how to bring more people at thay level.

Plagues and wars cannot help the environment, but the bettering of the condition of man kind can, and is the only way forward.

In order to help the Earth, we first have to help man kind.

Wars, and plagues do help “the environment" when the latter is meant in the way too many environmentalist view it - as a no-human wilderness.

The environment can be preserved if:

a) you keep the human population minuscule, at a primitive techonlogical level

b) you completely wipe out all humans

c) humans become so advanced they transcede their natural limitations

Single variable optimizations lead to funky results sometimes.

Unfortunately every major problem humanity faces today can be solved with properly targeted elimination of mass of people.

Mother nature has a way of healing itself

If this sounds desirable to you, by all means offer yourself as a volunteer for human sacrifice in the altar of Mother Nature.

I'd rather have vaccines.

How is my tinnitus and now vertigo helping save CO2?

Covid has massive painful ramifications throughout the world population and economy.

Surely we can do better than a plague to save the Earth.

This will most likely be over in a year or two after massive vaccinations and synthetic antibodies, but the economic impact will linger for a loot longer.

And guess what will happen when this is over and the world wakes up in a major economic crisis -- that's right, the world won't give a damn about the environment, it will all be about efforts to restart the world economy and cleanup the fallout.

"They keep our fish stock healthy, they keep the food chain intact, they keep diseases out of other animal populations," she said. "Good luck trying to replace that when we lose them."

Isn't human predation (fishing) a suitable alternative to shark predation for this purpose? I guess they eat a more wide diet of fish types.

Did putting in/replacing a predator in an eco system ever work? I can only think of countless examples where it didn't

There's a widely publicized example where wolves were reintroduced in a national reserve (Yellowstone National Park). The ecological effects were dramatic. Here's a quick video on it (jump to 2:35 for an even quicker viewing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc52l5ZcAJ0

That was restoring not replacing.

But the OP was asking about sharks as a predator which are clearly being restored.

Human fishing isn't selective, not the way a predator is selective.

Human predation doesn't apply the same positive evolutionary pressures as apex predators. Typically predators eat the slowest, weakest, dumbest prey. Humans either target the biggest, strongest prey (if hunting individuals) or indiscriminately massacre a swathe of the ecosystem (eg. dragnet fishing).

What is a "positive evolutionary pressure"? Why are fast, smart, strong fish important?

I'd imagine smart fish survive better in general; we're changing the environment, and brains can adapt faster than evolution.

Fast, strong fish are better sources of muscle, which is what we hunt them for.

Don't other apex predators hunt for size as well? And aren't whales similar in some ways to dragnet fishing? They don't target the weakest straggler sardines or the injured phytoplankton only.

Except we farm most of our fish. And sharks are out of the equation?

“Most”, yeah 50%. What about the other half? Just because we farm more fish now doesn’t mean we catch less in the wild. It just means we’re farming more.

And farming is growing. A reasonable projection is, wild fish will matter less over time until they are negligible.

As a concrete example.

My father in law is a fisherman, of various shellfish. Puts a premium on being sustainable and a lot of his business is farm raised shellfish.

Rays eat the shellfish. They can decimate beds of shellfish.

Sharks eat the rays.

I've joked with him about raising sharks as a farm raised fish. He laughs but gets kinda terrified of the idea because he actually thinks it through a bit half seriously and is nervous about sharks.

I'm surprised there isn't aquaculture programs for sharks though if there's such a demand. Lots of sharks are small.

My impression based on reading a bunch of links is that a bit of genetic engineering and bigger demand would improve yields and efficiency of plant and microbial squalene. It seems like in this type of situation the differential is usually due to historical convenience.

Biomedical research is full of examples of this sort of thing. It's not exactly a beacon historically for animal welfare. Horseshoe crabs are a similar example that come to mind as a para llel.

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