Science Closes In on Big-Scale Fish Poachers in the "Wild Wet"

[Judi Lynn]

New analysis shows where fish transfers that can obscure illegal catches are happening

By Maya Miller on July 26, 2018

On the six-month, 10,500-mile journey an albacore tuna typically makes from where it is caught in the southern Indian Ocean to a can on a U.S. grocery store shelf, it passes among countless hands—and from fishing boats on the high seas to larger vessels that ferry it to port in a process called transshipping. Now, for the first time, a series of satellite- and data-based analyses of the fishing supply chain shows how common this bucket brigade–like process is in the fishing industry, and could illuminate how it helps hide illegal fishing.

Transshipping “is something that we didn’t have a scientific handle on. Now we have eyes in the sky that can see some of this,” says Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who co-authored two new studies on the topic, published this week in Frontiers in Marine Science and Science Advances.

Transshipping is a decades-, if not centuries-old, practice employed for efficiency: It means fishing boats have to make fewer trips back to port, thus saving fuel, and can harvest fishes at sea for months or even years at a time. About half of all fishing that occurs in the so-called high seas (waters 200 nautical miles or more from shore) may involve transshipping, according to the Frontiers in Marine Science study. But there is a well-established lack of oversight or monitoring of these transfers, and this can muddy the origins of catches when authorities are trying to enforce regulations. The vast quantities of fishes caught illegally each year—about one in every five fishes that reaches the U.S. market, according to a robust worldwide study published in 2014—can easily be mixed with legal catch. Illegal fishing can deplete fish stocks, impede the recovery of fish populations and ecosystems, and costs the industry between $10 billion and $23.5 billion per year, a 2009 study showed. International organizations, including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, have also investigated and found (pdf) ties between transshipping and the smuggling of weapons and drugs—and even human trafficking.

Douglas McCauley, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the new work, likens transshipping to a person standing alone in a dark alleyway, waiting to meet someone else. “It’s not illegal, but it’s a behavior that’s often characteristic of something illegal,” he says. This new research, he adds, shines a headlight into the alleyway.

More:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-closes-in-on-big-scale-fish-poachers-in-the-wild-wet/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScientificAmerican-News+%28Content%3A+News%29

[2naSalit]

1. Good!