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Related: About this forumScience Closes In on Big-Scale Fish Poachers in the "Wild Wet"
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 handsand 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 brigadelike process is in the fishing industry, and could illuminate how it helps hide illegal fishing.
Transshipping is something that we didnt 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 yearabout one in every five fishes that reaches the U.S. market, according to a robust worldwide study published in 2014can 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 drugsand 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. Its not illegal, but its a behavior thats often characteristic of something illegal, he says. This new research, he adds, shines a headlight into the alleyway.
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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
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Science Closes In on Big-Scale Fish Poachers in the "Wild Wet" (Original Post)
Judi Lynn
Jul 2018
OP
2naSalit
(86,307 posts)1. Good!