Where Do Untraceable Fishing Fleets Go?

New York Times

4 days ago

For centuries, the oceans have been a notoriously lawless place. And today's industrial fishing vessels can sometimes be sneaky, turning off public tracking devices for months at a time or altering their signals to give a false location.
Recent advancements in satellite technology have made it possible to detect more of these ships that may be trying to hide. Known as 'dark vessels,' they make up at least 70 percent of all fishing fleets on the ocean.
Two research groups used this data, provided by the nonprofit Global Fishing Watch, to track truant ships across millions of kilometers of so-called marine protected areas, zones officially designated by countries as part of international goals to protect 30 percent of oceans by 2030.
Their studies, published Thursday in Science, offer the first answers to a longstanding question: Do these protections work?
'When most people think of protected areas, they assume it bans industrial fishing as a bare minimum of protection that a place would offer,' said Jennifer Raynor, an assistant professor of natural resource economics at the University of Wisconsin and lead author of one of the studies. 'But that's not necessarily true.'
Only 8 percent of the ocean is protected by these zones, and most do not explicitly ban industrial fishing. According to Marine Protection Atlas, less than 3 percent of the ocean fully bans industrial-scale activities, like trawling or deep sea mining.
Global Fishing Watch's tool uses satellite radar technology, which can scan through clouds and detect large metal objects on Earth, as a way to reveal oceangoing vessels that don't broadcast their location. One group found that two-thirds of all fishing fleets in protected areas were untracked by conventional means.
Dr. Raynor and her co-authors analyzed nearly 1,400 protected zones with explicit bans on industrial fishing. They found about five fishing vessels per 100,000 square kilometers at any given satellite sighting, compared with 42 in unprotected coastal waters.
About 30 percent of the area they studied showed one day of fishing or less in a given year. But because many of the unique designated zones are small, the vast majority of marine protected areas have almost no fishing activity.
That's good news, she said, because it suggests illegal poaching in these zones is 'surprisingly rare.'Some larger protected areas also had less fishing than expected. In Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which bans industrial fishing in about a third of its 350,000 square kilometers, the researchers detected an average of 900 hours.
In the Chagos Archipelago, an expanse encompassing several small island atolls in the Indian Ocean, the study also confirmed reports of illegal fishing. There, in an expanse nearly six times as large as the protected part of the Great Barrier Reef, fleets spent 2,700 hours, or about 112 days a year.
The second study, lead by Raphael Seguin, a Ph.D. student studying marine ecology at the University of Montpellier, France, shows that while protections appear to be working on paper, it may not necessarily be because fishing vessels are trying to abide by the rules.
The marine protected areas with the strictest restrictions are often located in areas that already were too coastal or remote to be industrial fishing hot spots, he said.
Mr. Seguin's analysis found that two-thirds of all industrial fishing fleets in 6,000 protected areas were untracked. Nearly half of all marine protected areas included in his study showed industrial fishing activity, in many cases matching unprotected waters nearby.
Dr. Seguin said this indicates the need for more marine protected areas with stricter standards. Otherwise, he said, countries are just creating 'paper parks,' a phrase used by researchers to describe protected zones where the restrictions aren't effective.
Fleets can break the rules in other ways, too. According to Dr. Raynor's analysis, a type of fishing net known as gill nets are allowed in the Camargue, a protected zone off the coast of France, but nearly 100 percent of fishing there is likely done by bottom-trawling, which is banned.
Boris Worm, a marine ecologist professor at the University of Dalhousie in Canada, reviewed the studies but was not affiliated with them, and said that together they show protections can work well, but more are needed.
He said that well protected areas can revive commercially important fish stocks, as well as protect pristine ones. Two decades of strict protections around the Galápagos brought an added bonus for tuna fishers who lined up at the edge of the reserve boundary, he said.
'They're reaping the benefits of tuna being relatively unbothered within the reserve,' Dr. Worm said. 'It's like you're turning on the tap inside, and at some point it starts overflowing.'
Dr. Raynor said the monitoring advancements have been a 'game changer in how much we understand about the ocean, even beyond protected areas.'
Previously countries primarily kept track of large boats on the ocean through a transponder-like identification system, though not all vessels are required to use them.
Last week, Global Fishing Watch announced an upgrade to its satellite monitoring database, which can detect smaller vessels and collect more information about their activities.
'It's such a change from history,' Dr. Worm said, 'when the things that humans did on the oceans went largely unseen.'