My feeling exactly on the first day of plenary....we don't get to the species proposals until tomorrow. Right now we are going through the piles upon piles of documents that were tweaked/parsed/edited agreed in Committee II and various working groups.
Thursday's plenary should be pretty exciting. This is when all species proposals that have been considered over the past two weeks can be reopened (not that they all will). I bet (fervently hope) most shark proposals will be reopened (except for perhaps spiny dogfish). Keep your fingers crossed that a) porbeagle remains listed (I bet some crafty opposing countries will be trying to get this ONE LONE GOOD DECISION on marine species here at CoP15 reversed) and b) that hammerheads can get the necessary votes to reverse Tuesday's decision. Most hammerheads are caught (on purpose or as bycatch to supply the lucrative fin trade) so this would go a long way in addressing the unregulated shark fin trade. And the ever-brilliant Dr. Phaedra Doukakis (who as I type is doing an interview for ABC's Moscow bureau on her recently released sturgeon paper which shows that sturgeon are more endangered than any other group of animals) told me that DNA analysis on fins is increasingly easy to do (and I believe one of the country interventions yesterday said that DNA analysis was becoming more affordable and available).
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