Saving Seafood

Ecuador to expand protected area around Galapagos Islands

November 2, 2021 — Ecuador will increase the area protecting the Galapagos Marine Reserve by 60,000 square kilometers, Ecuador President Guillermo Lasso announced at the United Nations COP26 climate summit taking place in Glasgow, Scotland.

The reserve will grow nearly 50 percent in size from its current 130,000 square kilometers, Lasso said. Ecuador’s newly created reserve would expand northward to include the Cocos Ridge and would completely ban industrial fishing in the reserve, as well as subsistence fishing in some areas. The move would be financed by a “debt-for-conservation swap,” according to Lasso, whereby Ecuador’s external debt could be forgiven in exchange for local investment in conservation programs. He did not provide further information. The South American nation’s external debt is nearly USD 46 billion (EUR 39.7 billion), equivalent to 45 percent of the country’s GDP.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Great Wall of Lights: China’s sea power on Darwin’s doorstep

September 24, 2021 — It’s 3 a.m., and after five days plying through the high seas, the Ocean Warrior is surrounded by an atoll of blazing lights that overtakes the nighttime sky.

“Welcome to the party!” says third officer Filippo Marini as the spectacle floods the ship’s bridge and interrupts his overnight watch.

It’s the conservationists’ first glimpse of the world’s largest fishing fleet: an armada of nearly 300 Chinese vessels that have sailed halfway across the globe to lure the elusive Humboldt squid from the Pacific Ocean’s inky depths.

As Italian hip hop blares across the bridge, Marini furiously scribbles the electronic IDs of 37 fishing vessels that pop up as green triangles on the Ocean Warrior’s radar onto a sheet of paper, before they disappear.

Immediately he detects a number of red flags: two of the boats have gone ‘dark,’ their mandatory tracking device that gives a ship’s position switched off. Still others are broadcasting two different radio numbers — a sign of possible tampering.

The Associated Press with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision accompanied the Ocean Warrior this summer on an 18-day voyage to observe up close for the first time the Chinese distant water fishing fleet on the high seas off South America.

The vigilante patrol was prompted by an international outcry last summer when hundreds of Chinese vessels were discovered fishing for squid near the long-isolated Galapagos Islands, a UNESCO world heritage site that inspired 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin and is home to some of the world’s most endangered species, from giant tortoises to hammerhead sharks.

Read the full story from the AP

 

U.S. urged to join South America in fighting China fishing

March 23, 2021 — The U.S. should consider leading a multilateral coalition with South American nations to push back against China’s illegal fishing and trade practices, a U.S. intelligence agency has recommended in a document obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: China’s illegal fishing industry is the largest in the world. Beijing has made distant-water fishing a geopolitical priority, viewing private Chinese fishing fleets as a way to extend state power far beyond its coasts.

  • A senior U.S. administration official confirmed to Axios that several agencies across the government are “taking a look at this in light of the president’s priorities,” which include “deepening cooperation with allies and partners on the challenges we face to our economy and national security.”

What’s happening: Huge fleets of hundreds of Chinese vessels have had boats fish illegally in the territorial waters of South American countries, including off the Galapagos Islands.

  • The activity has depleted stocks and disrupted food chains, in a practice referred to as illegal, unreported or unregulated (IUU) fishing.
  • South American nations say these fleets are a challenge to their economic and environmental security, but their navies often lack the resources to effectively monitor and patrol their own waters.
  • Last year, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru stated they would join forces to defend their territorial waters from incursions by Chinese vessels.

Read the full story at Axios

New Evidence Suggests China’s ‘Dark’ Vessels Poached in Galápagos Waters

October 20, 2020 — In late June, a fleet of about 300 Chinese fishing vessels swarmed around the rich, biodiverse waters of the Galápagos Islands, armed with overhead lights and industrial jigging machines to attract and catch squid. For the next few months, the vessels remained around the edge of the Ecuadoran islands’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ), raising concerns among conservationists that the fleet would overexploit the squid and capture endangered species such as rays and sharks.

Another worry was also hovering: would the vessels enter the EEZ and illegally fish, putting even more pressure on the delicate marine region and violating Ecuador’s sovereignty?

China’s ambassador to Ecuador said the fleet followed international fishing regulations and did not partake in any illegal activity, and Ecuadoran authorities said the fleet did not enter its waters. However, new information released last week by HawkEye 360, a Virginia-based data analytics company, shows that unidentified vessels were indeed present inside the Ecuadoran EEZ at the same time as many Chinese-owned fishing ships were undetectable via their automatic identification system (AIS), a GPS-based system that publicly transmits a vessel’s identify, speed and location.

There’s a strong correlation between these events, but they don’t necessarily confirm that illegal fishing took place, experts say. However, this new layer of information paints a fuller picture of what may have happened at the border of the Galápagos EEZ in the past few months.

Read the full story at The Wire

New Oceana Report Suggests Shady Fishing Practices By Large Fleet Near Galápagos

October 5, 2020 — In August, the world turned its attention towards the tiny Galápagos archipelago when nearly 300 Chinese-flagged vessels were found fishing near the Ecuadorian EEZ that encompasses the biologically-significant islands, raising concerns about illegal and unregulated fishing. A new report by environmental non-profit Oceana claims that the vessels, now moving south through Peru, may be purposefully turning off their satellite trackers to avoid detection.

Prompted to investigate by past illegal fishing in the same area in 2017, Oceana analyzed data from satellite transponders on the squid-fishing vessels over a one-month period to track vessel movements and map fishing activity.

Automatic Identification Systems

Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) on commercial vessels were originally used by ships to avoid collisions. A vessel’s identity, speed and location are automatically transmitted to satellite and terrestrial receivers at regular intervals. This publicly-available information is used by Global Fishing Watch, a public mapping tool developed by Oceana in collaboration with Google and SkyTruth, to visualize where vessels stop to fish, allowing for more scrutiny of potentially-illegal fishing activity.

Read the full story at Forbes

Past illegal activity dogs Chinese fleet that fished squid near Galapagos

September 24, 2020 — In early June, a fleet of around 260 boats from China reached the limits of Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone around the Galápagos Islands to fish for Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas). For months, the fleet skirted this area, drawing outrage among Ecuadorans as well as scientists and conservationists around the world.

The fleet remained in international waters and no ship crossed the country’s maritime limits, according to the Ecuadoran authorities, who detected no illegal actions. However, scientists and fishery analysts say the volume of fishing is so high as to potentially overexploit the squid. Moreover, the boats could be capturing species threatened with extinction. Beyond that, vessels within this fleet have a history of illegal fishing, according to Milko Schvartzman, a marine conservation specialist with the Argentine organization Circle of Environmental Policies, who has studied the fleet for years.

Experts say the presence of these ships is not only a problem for Ecuador but for other countries in the region, too. Every year they travel a route that goes from the South Atlantic off Argentina to the South Pacific near the Galápagos, passing through Chile and Peru. According to Schvartzman, at least two boats that have been caught illegally fishing in Argentine waters and were pursued by that country’s navy were fishing south of the Galápagos in August.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Latin American nations beef up naval power to fight IUU fishing

December 14, 2017 — As pressure on fish stocks increases worldwide, countries are scaling up their military responses to threats posed by both local and foreign fleets fishing illegally in their territorial waters.

A Huffington Post article noted that Ecuador’s navy and the Galapagos National Park Service (GNPS) have been patrolling the Galapagos Islands together for some years now in joint operations to combat illegal fishing there.

“Their collaboration did not stop with traditional patrols,” the article went on to note. “In 2009, they established joint-control centers and deployed satellite vessel monitoring transceivers aboard all vessels of 20 gross tons to stop illegal fishing of the national commercial fleet.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Navy sonar that harms whales and dolphins was improperly approved, US court finds

July 19, 2016 — The US Navy is now using a particular type of sonar in more than half of the world’s oceans under an illegal permit. That sonar harms marine mammals like whales, dolphins, seals, and walruses. On Friday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in California found that a 2012 regulation that allowed the Navy to use a low-frequency active sonar for training and testing violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

“The court found that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which gave the authorization, isn’t doing enough to avoid harming or killing marine mammals under the law. The Marine Mammal Protection Act calls for the “least practicable adverse impact” on marine mammals and their habitats. The court also found that the federal agency failed to protect areas of the world that its own government experts had flagged as “biologically important” to protect marine life. Such areas include the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off of Hawaii, and Challenger Bank off of Bermuda.

The Navy had been authorized to use the high-intensity long-range sonar — called low-frequency active sonar, or LFA — for five years across more than 70 percent of the world’s oceans, in areas of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea. The NMFS has to set certain limits to activities, like military training, that could harm marine mammals. The goal is to reduce the impact on marine life to its lowest possible level.

Read the full story at The Verge