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?
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.
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According to the article these fish are sold locally, with obvious damage from the blasts to their internal organs. So it's not the reason fish is cheap in Western countries. AFAIK cheap fish mostly comes from farms.
> Otherwise how would people have cheap fish?
Cast a net or eat tempeh. It being convenient doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it.
+1 for tempeh, incredible tasty and healthy food. Anyone should try it at least once in their lifetime.
Tempeh is good, and I fully support it.
Why is this downvoted? It is a reasonable comment.
Casting a net is actually one of the less sustainable ways to fish.
"You say we should improve society yet participate in it, curious"
Compared to throwing bombs in the water?
I'm curious. Do you mean spoiled during the production process (ie was inedible to begin with) or spoiled in storage (ie was edible at time of purchase)?
Think you might be casting too wide a net there. It certainly can be.
Which sort of net casting? I grew up with a hand-case 8ft diameter net. I'll guarantee you that's a billion times more sustainable than a trawler.
> Otherwise how would people have cheap fish?
Fish farming?
> While fishers predominantly use the method to catch fish for sale at local markets
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.
Same place, ~200 meters away from my tent: https://i.postimg.cc/5NN9w92m/IMG-20220802-173453-MP.jpg
This is the repo if people are interesting in this work: https://github.com/ben-williams-ai/Bomb-Fishing
How did we get to loonie tunes levels of absurdity? I understand dragnet fishing is destructive, but who first decided that dynamite was a good fishing method?
"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.
I love the American measurement units. How many bald eagles of explosives are needed to destroy three football fields worth of reef?
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.
Don't Brits usually call it a football pitch?
Brits actually originally called it soccer. They changed to football at some point a while back. Maybe he's doing a super-throwback?
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.
The rest of the world has moved on to the metric system. Even NASA did.
UK should not hold us back with their shenanigans.
What is good about metric is that once you have a good feel for different lengths of mm, cm,meters and kilometres you don’t need to worry about things like “10 Super Bowl stadiums”. You can easily extrapolate what 27km2 means, it doesn’t have to “look like” anything.
Even NASA uses AUs and degrees which are both not metric.
The UK is arguably worse than the US in this regard. The US has mainly stayed with a system that sticks to one measurement across use cases. If I burn fuel at a rate of x miles per y gallons, I purchase it at the pump in gallons. If Tommy Atkins burns fuel at a rate of x miles per y gallon, he purchases it at the pump in liters; there's an extra step for conversion.
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).
four to five Big Mac's worth.
advanced question for the college types: how many if you supersize it?
Which supersize, with shrinkflation applied or illegal in NY?
You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…
I think the point is the opposite, I also expected a lot more damage from a bomb every hour
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."
Yeah, but the reefs aren't the goal. They're probably mostly not blowing up reef, but occasionally do it it - hence why so many bombs clears so little reef. If it was massively reducing reef coverage, you'd expect to see the method die off once too much reef is gone.
Fishers, I would guess, are aware of fish wanting to be near reefs.
I would assume the area was larger than reported. I mean that's 24*365 bombs per year.
I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?
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.
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.
Mine came much later, in the Triplets of Belleville (2003). In case it brings a nostalgic smile to anyone else’s face, too:
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.
It’s been commercial in SE Asia for decades. Personally seen it in Thailand and Indo 20+ years ago.
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.
Prevalence and availability is changing. Old technique better distribution on how to.
The thought of the fishermen watching tiktok on how to poach is ludicrous. They're perfectly aware about this method and its high illegality. It might be new to 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.
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.
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.
I wonder if there’s a version of Maslow’s hierarchy that applies to countries/societies.
Kohlberg's theory of moral development comes to mind.
I read the article looking for any mention of how they classified the recorded events as bomb blasts versus impulses from seismic surveying for oil and gas. That region has been very active since at least 2015 with seismic surveys and in 2023, the period covered by the article there were several crews operating.
I know that seismic survey acquisition should be easily identifiable because those shots occur at precise intervals during the survey and continue all day long with no breaks unless there is an equipment failure or other reason to shut down. A 10 second interval would be one common example.
The damages from activities like this are terrible. Using explosives as a seismic sources was banned in the late 1970's I think due to harms done to marine mammals and organisms and the environment in general. Since then, airguns firing compressed air have been the dominant marine seismic source. Depending on the bandwidth of the bubble created and the volume of the airgun array they can also be extremely destructive to marine mammals like whales and porpoises so crews employ biologists as whale watchers in those areas where activity can be expected so that the effects on whales can be minimized.
It is still a serious issue in offshore exploration though.
Bomb fishing is something I would expect to hear about from some redneck coon-ass from Lousyana. I guess that people everywhere figured out how to stun fish to improve catch quantities and some use that as the primary method now. Maybe if deeper waters weren't fished out they could just go further offshore. Once you have foreign fleets dragging up everything in their paths then the only fish left are around the reefs.
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.
This is not an obsession with hurting animals. It’s survival and earning a living for these Indonesian fishermen.
To incentivize them to stop you have to give them better options. In this case, teach a man to not fish with explosives and you’ll feed him for the rest of his life.
> It’s survival and earning a living for these Indonesian fishermen.
Why make excuses for greedy jackasses? Their ancestors didn't invent this 5,000 years ago and it's the "oNlY wAy they can survive." They fished without bombs once. Some guy realized this depraved method works, so now lazy people choose to do it so they can get money faster than the people fishing legitimately can. That's why it's illegal.
For context, a worth-a-read Wikipedia entry regarding the term:
Low-cost acoustic sensors paired with community reporting usually beat complex tech solutions when enforcing marine boundaries in remote areas.
Bomb fishing is bad. I am surprised that only 3 football field equivalent areas are destroyed per year in a country as vast as Indonesia.
I hate the idea but this article makes me optimistic that other proactive measures that are not mentioned might be restoring a lot more than this.
Read critically.
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.
They're the same brand of morally-bankrupt pieces of shit who poach elephants all day long just to hack off the tusks to grind into some idiot's superstitious penis pills. Someday they'll all be gone and they'll just shrug and move onto the next appalling way of making a quick buck.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#Examples_and_evide... has several examples of prior ‘art’, and I don’t think that list is complete. Herring almost became extinct in the Atlantic in the 1970s, for example.
And that’s only fishing. Other examples include the passenger pigeon, the American bison, and the dodo.
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 the first world and the rest of the world is that the first world has more sympathy for the non-existing, abstract humans from the distant future.
China is doing this with their ghost fleets in south american waters. Just terrible.
You mean, everyone else is fishing nicely? Are you sure about that?
People will do literally anything if they are hungry enough.
True. However, often times the people benefiting from this are plenty fed.
It's more like "People will do anything for money"
Money is a claim on valuable things, so people will do anything to get more of valuable things. Some may say that's just an abstracted form of biological hunger.
are there other sources of food available?
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).
Not to do poverty Olympics, but I once was poor, living on an island, and reliant on fish for a lot of meals. Don’t assume I can’t empathize.
Why so quick to make excuses for selfish and mind-bendingly stupid people? Why are you assigning guilt on the “rich west” for a local practice that is for local consumption? Not every indigenous practice is good. Some are the reason those communities can’t escape poverty. It’s not colonialism or oppression, their problem is stupidity.
I think some people belong to the very popular new religion that holds as dogma that anything bad done by someone in the developing world must be the fault of evil Westerners somehow.
> It’s not colonialism or oppression, their problem is stupidity.
bingo
>this lacks empathy for the struggle to survive
The article addresses that objection.
Ricidulous fishing in real life
yeah maybe lets not do bomb fishing
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.
It’s wild that people are this dumb.
I’m sure if you told an indigenous tribe you were planning to do this they’d agree that it’s stupid, yet here we are.
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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.
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Ahistoric defeatism. Embraces our nature, instead of fleeing for the hills of utopism. Learn to steer it, change it. We accomplished wonders- humanity is calm and peaceful compared to what it once was.
The gaming industry and cellphones alone have pacified a species whose footprint is ever shrinking. Literal monks with hypnotic glowing stones, this whole industry is a miracle and has given nature a breather it would not have had without it.
ever shrinking? mon ami we're collapsing the global ecological system.
soon humanity will be the only footprint that matters.
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Let's not forget the scorpions. They also deserve a turn.
They would do the exact same as humanity given the tech. Natural organism doing natural things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henderson_Island_(Pitcairn_Isl...
For context, if one missed it:
The scorpions and cockroaches will have to fight it out. Life will go on.
Scorpions had a turn when the giant ones preyed on our lungfish ancestors.
This is our turn; eg, similarly dinosaurs preying on proto-mammals and our abuses of avians.
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.
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.
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.
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
Say that again when your children are starving.
Thanks to these assholes destroying entire fisheries, I might not have to wait long.
Sell the bombs and buy food with the money?
If you have money for buying bombs, you have money for a fishing rod to feed your children for the entire year.
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.
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”.
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.
There aren't many more reasons but greed to destroy ecosystems with bombs and detonators.
Send them some subsidies from those large American coffers then, and they won't need to
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.
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.
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
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.
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”.
> 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.
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.
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I bet many of the people here moaning and whinging eat fish themselves!
I bet almost nobody here eats bombfished fish. <0.1%
> 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.
No fishers, no food.
Incoherent, broken logic.
No bombs, no fishers.
Damn, watertight logic
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"
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.
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.
Have any areas in GoT shown recovery from blasting and/or bleaching without human intervention? I have fond memories of Koh Tao circa 2009...
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!
Mossy earth has been doing a (i think quite successful) restoration of an coral area damaged by bomb fishing in indonesia. Here is a 2 year recap of the program and the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0bkMhhMHOw
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?
> 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.
While it's hard to regulate fishing when your country is made up of endless islands, it's quite easy to regulate dynamite. So no, I don't think the number of islands is an excuse.
In Fiji, for example, no fisherman could get dynamite if they wanted it. The only way to get that is if you run a (very heavily regulated) mine, or a quarry, and you'd have to account for every blast.
The fishermen don't use regular dynamite. They make their own with easily available agricultural and mining chemicals, which are impossible to ban on the island without other worse effects.
Does it have to be dynamite or are other, improvised explosives possible?
Indonesia gets a free pass for an ongoing genocide, so it's not surprising nobody cares about them breaking coral.
Care to explain for those of us unaware?