As we all know, it’s Shark Week.

And during Shark Week, we usually celebrate the awesome terror that this eating machine inspires. But today we look at the shark as victim of high-end commerce, an at-risk species that can end up as a soup available in Las Vegas and favored by Asian tourists. Since the shark fin trade is unregulated, this means that the shark meat used in soups might be from one of the at-risk species, like the scalloped hammerhead.

Recently, biologists have discovered a way of using the shark’s DNA to trace its origins and determine whether the fin found in soup has been harvested from an at-risk species of shark.

GUESTS

Al Mancini, Las Vegas food writer

Demian Chapman, Institute for Conversation Science at Stony Brook University