The Great Big Sea: Casting a Light on a Vast Expanse

I exercise regularly, partly because I know it is good for me but mostly because it is a time reserved for me to listen to podcasts. There are podcasts I listen to regularly like Planet Money, The Daily, This American Life, and Embedded and others. Sometimes I need to listen to something new, something that really grabs me. That’s exactly what The Outlaw Ocean did. It sucked me in and squeezed the air from my lungs because the stories are true and they are shocking. The Outlaw Ocean is produced by a project of the same name. It is a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington D.C. The podcast is a seven-part series that recounts more than eight years of reporting covering all seven oceans and more than three dozen countries. The first episode begins with the following account: The video came to me from a source at Interpol, and all it had was the subject line: Brace yourself. I opened it and, you know, it was hard to make out what was going on at first. It was obviously shot on someone's phone.The camera is super wobbly. It's at sea and the water is very blue, and you see several large tuna long liners. These are big steel ships. And very early on into the video, you start hearing gunshots. And that's when I immediately stopped everything else I was doing and focused. The guy's in the water are clinging to this wooden wreckage of some sort. It looks like a small boat that's been destroyed with a gun fire is coming at them and missing them. You see it sort of slice into the water. And the guy on the wreckage is now holding up…Jesus Christ. He holds up his hands, palms up, and then his head. And there's blood all over the water.” Are you hooked yet? I was!

The Murder Video, episode 1, is the horrific story of a murder caught on camera and the unfolding story of the mercenary ways of some illegal fishing vessels. The Dark Fleet, episode 2, is a 10,000 nautical mile chase across Antarctic of one of the most wanted illegal fishing vessels and the extent of their illegal catch. A 45-mile long gill net, that took 100 hours to reel in, is only part of this incredible tale. There’s slave trading, and so much more. These stories demonstrate that the ocean is a vast realm where much goes undetected and where there is little to no law enforcement. It’s a place where big profits are to be made and it comes at many peoples expense. The podcast is based on the book of the same name written by New York Times best selling author an American investigative reporter Ian Urbina. Urbina is founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project.

Global Fishing Watch

The world’s oceans are a vast realm, on a scale that makes it far too time consuming, too costly, and too dangerous for any single entity to manage. The result is that the high seas are poorly understood and under protected. Detailed information about the scope and whereabouts of fishing is often lacking. Global Fishing Watch (GFW) has been working to make the high seas a frontier where stakeholders can assess the extent to which the world’s oceans are being used and misused. GFW is an open access satellite and machine learning technology that provides map visualizations and data and analyses tools to better visualize the challenges facing the world’s oceans. The data identifies hot spots of previously heretofore unseen fishing vessels making it possible to determine where and how much fishing activity is actually occurring.

Jaeyoon Park (GFW) along with colleagues reported in an issue of Science Advances that illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing is a major challenge. “Most fishing vessels do not broadcast their positions and are ‘dark’ in public monitoring systems.” An example of this challenge can be found in the waters off North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and Russia. In these waters stocks of Japanese flying squid (Todarodes pacificus) are heavily targeted. A lack of information “prevents accurate stock assessment in a fishery where reported catches have dropped by 80 and 82% in South Korean and Japanese waters, respectively, since 2003.” This is troubling because the squid is of critical importance to South Korea where the squid is ranked top seafood by production value. In Japan, the squid is among the top five seafoods consumed and in North Korean it was the third largest export before sanctions were imposed.

Park et al.’s research utilized four different satellite technologies to assess fishing operations. When used in combination, the technologies provide sufficient data to paint a representative picture of fishing activities. Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) is a technology that was originally developed to reduce the likelihood of vessel collisions. AIS equipment aboard a vessel sends out a unique vessel identification. In addition it provides information on the vessel’s position, course and speed. Vessels that do not wish to be tracked can turn off the AIS. Without AIS a vessel can operate undetected and possibly fish in waters banned to fishing. Of course, without AIS vessel and its crew are at an elevated risk for collision.

Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is another satellite technology. It is able to track the bright lights that vessels use to attract flying squid. Large vessels of 55- to 60-meters are equipped with lights that emit the light equivalent to a football stadium. When used in combination satellite technologies “can identify potential hot spots of illegal, unregulated, or unreported fishing. Global fisheries have long been dominated by a culture of confidentiality and concealment and achieving a comprehensive view of fishing activities at sea is an important step toward sustainable and cooperative fisheries management.”

Legal Overfishing

It is reported that the biggest culprit in declining fish stocks is not illegal fishing but actually legal overfishing. An astonishing fact is that “more than a quarter of all the fish pulled from the sea ends up as fishmeal.” In Episode  5 of The Outlaw Ocean the focus is pn the African West Coast nation of Gambia. The country has three fishmeal factories. They process local fish like Bonga into a high protein powder or pellets and ship it abroad. The fishmeal is used to feed pets, livestock and farmed raised fish. The decline in Bonga in Gambian markets has left communities without their daily source of protein.

Aquaculture or the practice of raising fish was once thought to be a solution to the world’s need for high quality protein. There has been a growing awareness that farm-raised fish costs are far greater than the benefit. Among the costs is pollution, the consequence of concentrating large numbers of fish in a single pen, sometimes as many as 200,000 fish. Arguably the most troubling problem is that more food energy is used to produce the fish that what is produced. Ian Urbina that in the “case of tuna, for example, you can have a single tuna that will eat 15 times its own weight in fishmeal before it’s to the size that it needs to be to be put on the market. So even conscientious consumers who are trying to be, you know, ethical buyers are quite likely eating fish that are taking food off of the tables of Gambians or others in the developing world.”

The economics of farm-raised fish don’t make sense either. “Forty per cent of the cost of raising a farmed fish is the feed. Farming companies would like to reduce that by turning their salmon into vegetarians, but this is not easy because salmon have short intestines designed for digesting meat but not well-suited for plants.” Farmers are looking for alternatives such as soy but soy contains far less protein than fish.

The Problem of a Global Commons

The work of organizations like Global Fishing Watch and The Outlaw Ocean Project is important. It helps cast a light on what goes on in the world’s vast oceans. They provide data to help make informed choices for the management of fish stocks. But problems remain. The world’s oceans are wide and deep and managing them across international borders is a complicated business. Questions such as how or whether to manage fisheries, who might be utilizing a resource at the expense of others, and who has the authority and resources to enforce regulations are challenges yet to resolve.