Bomb Fishing Is Wreaking Havoc on Indonesia's Coral Reefs
Off Indonesia's Spermonde Archipelago, researchers recorded over 3,500 underwater explosions in 3,600 hours, estimating more than 8,500 blasts annually. Using AI and open-source software, they found bomb fishing occurs year-round, peaks in the mornings, and drops on Fridays. Each blast destroys about 200 square feet of reef, contributing to a 75% coral loss since 1990. Experts say the practice, driven by ineffective enforcement, turns vibrant reefs into rubble, but unlike climate stressors, it's a solvable problem.
These picturesque reefs get converted into a landscape that looks like the moon. It’s just rubble and dead coral with very little sign of life.
- wraptile
I'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be.
What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time.
However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is practically gone now and the story here is very insightful.
Some of it is due to Thailand's geography and high demand for marine tourism but the biggest push here was EU and US regulation that gave Thailand opportunity to shape up. In 2015 (same year when Thai anti blast laws were codified more strictly) US TIP (trafficking in persons) report down-graded Thailand to tier 3 mostly due to fishing slave workers while at the same time EU's IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing) issued a yellow card. All of which lead to the biggest fishery reform in Thai history which mostly eliminated blast fishing.
Since then Thailand is back to tier 2 of TIP and got lost the yellow card from EU's IUU. Indonesia never got tier 3 of TIP despite many arguing it should have and never got a card from IUU. Stories like this turn me into a globalization believer - I know it's not perfect but the system is kinda working?
- wlaw15
Sometimes you learn of an unintended consequence of seemingly good idea wreaking havoc on an ecosystem. I would not put fishing with "plastic bottles filled with explosives" into that category.
- willmeyers
This is the repo if people are interesting in this work: https://github.com/ben-williams-ai/Bomb-Fishing
- adjejmxbdjdn
We need to stop our obsession with exploiting animals.
It’s leading us to do insane things damaging our own health and the environment, nevermind how much suffering it’s causing the actual sentient beings we’re using.
- pajko
Had experienced grenade fishing in person on the Vjosa in Albania. Was kayaking when a 20-30(-40?) meters high water column appeared about 300 meters in front of me, accompanied by a big bang. Not cool.
- pingou
"With a bomb dropped once every 62 minutes, the equivalent of three football fields of reef are destroyed each year, according to Williams."
That doesn't sound right.
- tobyjsullivan
I wonder if there’s a version of Maslow’s hierarchy that applies to countries/societies.
- boringg
File this under the category "people are f-bomb-ing idiots".
I wouldn't be surprised if social media was spreading this technique as successful way to fish.