Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
Comments
wraptile
ghm2199
Is it just a matter of incentives by the government in indonesia? Like is it that bomb fishing in indonesia is incentivized because of, for example, profit margins in fishing vs say tourism?
I know you mentioned Indonesia never got the yellow card it should have and that certainly creates less incentives for them to straighten their act. But I am trying to understand if the government is still largely to blame or not?
wraptile
> But I am trying to understand if the government is still largely to blame or not?
all blast fishing is a failure of governance so I'd say yes but the fishing cultures here in SEA are so different from anywhere else in the world so it's very hard to govern without strong central body. Lots of cultural, religious, poverty and spiritual stuff mixed into all of that which really complicates things.
IMO Thailand has a much stronger centralized government and just better geography to make enforcement easier. It's mostly mainland with coastlines while Indonesia is mostly islands which are notoriously difficult to govern. So to answer your question, it's probably just that incentives in Thailand go much further due to all of these variables.
throwaway2037
Thanks for sharing your first-hand account of diving in Thailand. I think they should aggressively pursue coral planting. They are several projects in Indonesia that have demonstrated excellent results. I volunteered for a day doing coral planting in Bali, Indonesia. As part of the dive, they take you to different parts of the coral reef as it recovers, showing you how it changes year after year. You can see the change with your own eyes.
wraptile
I agree though we had very mid results here in the Gulf of Thailand while the Andaman Sea side has had more luck. The issue with Gulf of Thailand is that it's just so shallow with avg depth of only 50m and too calm making new coral growth very hard with existing techniques. There's some new promising research on alternative methods of raising coral larva in labs, but I'm not up to speed with that yet and it seems quite complex.
bbondo
Have any areas in GoT shown recovery from blasting and/or bleaching without human intervention? I have fond memories of Koh Tao circa 2009...
wraptile
Koh Tao is definitely not doing great compared to 2009 though there is some bounce back lately. I just moved from there to Koh Chang which despite poor visibility still has a lot of absolutely stunning untouched corals though unlike Koh Tao it takes an hour-long boat ride to get out there. Koh Phangan recently made news on massive natural recovery, so there's a lot of hope in the Gulf of Thailand still!
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.
ungreased0675
It’s hard to believe this is real. Destroying a vibrant ecosystem for a one-time catch is so selfish and shortsighted it’s amazing to me that anyone would seriously consider doing it.
raincole
What's so hard to believe? Bomb fishing has been a common practice for decades. And poisoning fishing. And electrocuting fishing. Only first-world citizens would find these surprising in the slightest sense.
The difference between first world and the rest of the world is the first world has more sympathy for the non-existing, abstract humans in the distant future.
reticulates
The degree to which this lacks empathy for the struggle to survive that people have the world over is harder to believe. Sincerely, though, all fishing is pretty terrible, we (the rich west) have been overfishing and pillaging the oceans for decades. Even now in peak concern for the environment, we really don’t care nearly enough. If you personally want to avoid contributing to ravaging of the planet, switch to a low impact diet (e.g: only eat chicken, or go vegan).
superbatfish
>this lacks empathy for the struggle to survive
The article addresses that objection.
kridsdale1
People will do literally anything if they are hungry enough.
thinkingtoilet
True. However, often times the people benefiting from this are plenty fed.
moomoo11
are there other sources of food available?
MaxHoppersGhost
China is doing this with their ghost fleets in south american waters. Just terrible.
shevy-java
You mean, everyone else is fishing nicely? Are you sure about that?
tobyjsullivan
I wonder if there’s a version of Maslow’s hierarchy that applies to countries/societies.
oasisbob
Kohlberg's theory of moral development comes to mind.
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.
ryandrake
I love the American measurement units. How many bald eagles of explosives are needed to destroy three football fields worth of reef?
superbatfish
The quote you're referring to came from the study's lead author, a Brit. Presumably he was referring to soccer (which everyone else calls "football"). Furthermore, a soccer field and an American football field are reasonably close in area, so it gets the point across in any case.
However, I will now refer to explosives exclusively in units of Bald Eagles when referring to their mass, and "star spangles" when referring to their energy output.
BoxOfRain
This isn't a uniquely American thing to be fair, in the UK it's not unusual to discuss area in terms of football pitches or for very large areas, Wales.
shevy-java
The rest of the world has moved on to the metric system. Even NASA did.
UK should not hold us back with their shenanigans.
throwaway2037
What a low value comment. In this case, a European football (soccer) field/pitch is reasonably close in size to an American football field. If the article had used square feet or acres, your comment might be more relevant. Google tells me that FIFA football pitch size is 105 meters long by 68 meters wide (7140 sq m). American football field size is 110 meters long by 53 meters wide (5830 sq m).
red-iron-pine
four to five Big Mac's worth.
advanced question for the college types: how many if you supersize it?
cannonpr
You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…
franciscop
I think the point is the opposite, I also expected a lot more damage from a bomb every hour
AlwaysRock
I'd suspect that the goal isn't to destroy coral reefs and the damage is "accidental." And/or the reefs are already largely fucked, so additional damage is "minimal."
throwaway2037
To be clear, coral reefs are essentially collectors/attractors/homes for a huge number of fish species. If you go away from a coral reef (even 50 meters), there is large drop-off in the amount of fish in the water column -- almost none. They are absolutely bomb fishing within coral reefs because there are lots of fish.
chinathrow
I would assume the area was larger than reported. I mean that's 24*365 bombs per year.
deadbunny
I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?
willmeyers
This is the repo if people are interesting in this work: https://github.com/ben-williams-ai/Bomb-Fishing
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.
pajko
Same place, ~200 meters away from my tent: https://i.postimg.cc/5NN9w92m/IMG-20220802-173453-MP.jpg
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.
dghlsakjg
It IS a successful way to fish if you care about feeding your kids tonight, and not in 10 years.
Fishermen were doing this in Indonesia decades ago. Pretty well known technique.
orbital-decay
Blast fishing has been practiced since at least early 20th century. Essentially everyone knows about it and understands how destructive it is, no social media required. Some people just don't care.
boringg
Prevalence and availability is changing. Old technique better distribution on how to.
orbital-decay
The thought of fishermen watching tiktok on how to poach is ludicrous. They're perfectly aware about this method and its high illegality. It might be new for some HN readers who aren't going to do this anyway, though.
>how to
Dynamite goes into the water, fish goes belly up, 90% of the catch is lost. It's not rocket science.
dmkolobov
My first encounter with the concept of bomb fishing was the Shapoklyak episode of the soviet cartoon Cheburashka, produced in the 70s. It's been around.
alwa
Mine came much later, in the Triplets of Belleville (2003). In case it brings a nostalgic smile to anyone else’s face, too:
mc32
Yeah it’s been around for a while but it’s been at the individual level not at the commercial scale which makes the practice way worse.
dghlsakjg
It’s been commercial in SE Asia for decades. Personally seen it in Thailand and Indo 20+ years ago.
red-iron-pine
idiots? this is clever af. maximum fish for limited effort.
the coral is a tragedy of the commons things; it's a sweet deal for lazy fisherman.
KellyCriterion
For context, a worth-a-read Wikipedia entry regarding the term:
pranav_tech26
Low-cost acoustic sensors paired with community reporting usually beat complex tech solutions when enforcing marine boundaries in remote areas.
shevy-java
Well - bombs sounds fancy. How about those huge trawlers that drag everything out? Does not sound as dangerous as bomb fishing. But destroys more than bomb fishing objectively.
epolanski
We truly deserve to get extinct. There's nothing but selfishness and greed from Wall Street to San Francisco to the Indonesian fisheries and Indian farms.
quietsignal
Note that the selfishness of the farmer or fisherman may in certain light differ from the greed of the capitalist, if one’s family endurance depends on it.
TSiege
If you read the article it’s pretty clear this is greed and short sighted thinking
> While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation. The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
“A combination of factors drives blast fishing, including ineffective enforcement and management,” said Hampton-Smith, highlighting how indiscriminate the explosions are, killing all manner of species, regardless of age, size, or intent.
epolanski
Those are nothing but excuses.
Destroying habitats and the future of fellow fishermen for short-term gain is just selfishness and greed.
Desperation is no excuse.
TSiege
To those replying that it’s feeding starving children read the article. The equipment to do this isn’t accessible to poor fishermen. From the article, “While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation. The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.”
I’d argue this practice hurts poor fisherman more than helps as coral reefs are important nurseries for fish and reliable sources as well. Blowing them up will rob communities of shallow fishing grounds and future fish
horacemorace
Say that again when your children are starving.
rdiddly
Thanks to these assholes destroying entire fisheries, I might not have to wait long.
eloisius
Easy to say when it’s not your child facing starvation. The long term doesn’t matter if your family isn’t going to make it another month.
Avicebron
RTFA, they say they it's not poverty, the explosives and boats involved mean that it's not the desperate doing this. It's greed, the sooner we can be less paternalistic about this kind of stuff the sooner we can start addressing these kind of problems. It's like India or china being major polluters, they need to be held accountable just like the west holds/held itself accountable.
zmgsabst
I enjoy when HN engages in overt racism like this — eg, denying peer agency and morality to SE Asians, due to the posters feeling above those “lessers”.
Paternalistic racism might as well be a central tenet of certain political movements — whose entire ideology is that certain humans are not fully equal as thinking moral agents in the world.
The new “scientific racism”.
parineum
Anything beyond ascetic maximalism will be cast as greed to the naturists and malthusians.
There's always someone out there who is going to make the argument.
epolanski
There aren't many more reasons but greed to destroy ecosystems with bombs and detonators.
bcjdjsndon
Send them some subsidies from those large American coffers then, and they won't need to
paimapi
blunt comment but not technically wrong - it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique' and much of that originates from a combination of the colonial carve up of Indonesia [0] in combination with the weak and easily exploited position of the country within globalized economic markets [1]
[0] https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenter...
>Centuries of Dutch control produced an ethnic and economic caste system familiar to many colonized peoples. Compared to some imperial powers, Dutch policy was less focused on “Dutchifying” the indigenous population, with most attention paid to resource extraction and maritime strategic advantage.
[1] https://archive.org/details/ahmad-nashih-luthfi-muhammad-fau...
>The short cut to development that the New Order took was highly depending on foreign loans. Consequently, development models were very much shaped by the foreign institutions that became the source of finance for Indonesia. At the end of the 1980s for instance, the World Bank forced for the project for the construction of Kedung Ombo Dam [...] The construction of the Dam had caused thousands of people and tens of villages to be evicted and involuntarily resettled. The Dam became the symbol of prestige for the New Order. When the New Order regime collapsed, the dam was abandoned and gradually left to dry.
Poacher5
That's addressed in the article? The claim made is that this is more a way of middle-income market-trading fishermen increasing their catch and profit. Those at the bottom can't afford the necessary explosives.
paimapi
that's an uncited claim framed as a guess, not confirmation or even a more educated guess by people performing actual ethnographies and larger demographic analysis. pair it against both the fact that these bombs are easy to make (plastic bottle + explosive) and the stronger kinship ties of families and villages, it's not impossible to imagine groups pooling money to purchase fertilizer on the gray market
you'd have to imagine that higher earners would easily be able to navigate out to deeper waters with better boats whereas lower income would stay in shallower waters which is noted as largely where this is happening
mushi_shi
Yeah, why go through all of the effort to blame this on colonialism? Maybe these people just suck and don't care/don't know any better. We can't make everything a problem of colonialism.
zmgsabst
They feel superior to those “lesser” humans, when denying them equal intelligence, agency, and morality.
They’re just getting off on being racist to the “savages who don’t know better”.
joshuaissac
> it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique'
From the article:
> While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation.
> The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
parineum
How big of a boat do you think you need to scoop up some fish?
None of those things cost a lot of money and the return on investment for just affording a single bomb pays for itself almost immediately.
heyitsmedotjayb
I bet many of the people here moaning and whinging eat fish themselves!
kubb
I bet almost nobody here eats bombfished fish. <0.1%
spindump8930
> While fishers predominantly use the method to catch fish for sale at local markets — identifiable by their ruptured internal organs and burst swim bladders
The article agrees, assuming "here" is global north tech workers.
heyitsmedotjayb
No fishers, no food.
kubb
Incoherent, broken logic.
everdrive
No bombs, no fishers.
aqfamnzc
Damn, watertight logic
micromacrofoot
What's the point of this post? if you're trying to shame people into vegetarianism it's not going to work, and I'm one myself.
There's basically one solution to bomb fishing: make it economically nonviable. You could ban it an punish the people doing it, which is often the immediate action taken and seems like the path being set up here...
but really any money spent on enforcement may be better spent on setting the bomb fishers up with the tools to make a living doing something else — ironically "teach a man to fish"
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?