最近，美国科学家首次采用DNA鉴定技术，从香港一个小渔市的干鱼翅追溯出这种鲨鱼的发源地，并发现有21%的鱼翅来自鲨鱼被列为濒危物种的海区。

    For the first time, DNA tools have successfully pinpointed the geographic origin of dried shark fins sold in markets for shark fin soup.

    Using genetic methods, scientists traced scalloped hammerhead shark fins from a burgeoning Hong Kong fish market to the sharks’ original populations, some of which are endangered and located in waters thousands of miles away, according to a new study published in the journal Endangered Species Research.

    Demian Chapman, an assistant director at Stony Brook University’s Institute for Ocean Conservation Science in the U.S., and his colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA sequences passed from mother to offspring for 177 live scalloped hammerheads in the western Atlantic ocean. They also took fingernail-sized DNA samples from 62 shark fins of this species obtained at a Hong Kong fish market.

    A comparison of the two sets of data revealed that the market fins came from populations in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific oceans. Twenty-one percent of the fins originated in waters off of Belize, Brazil, Panama and the United States where the shark is endangered according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.