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- Hacker News
- There was a short doco on this in a recent Australian show if anyone is interestedby auszeph
- Honest question: How many boats are actually doing this? It might just be one or two, but they are on the water 300+ days per year, and "bombing" for 12 hours a day. I think just one or two boats could do a huge amount of damage. Also, it seems pretty easy to fix this problem: Offer a reasonably large financial reward for information that leads to the arrest/conviction of captains of bomber boats. Probably the workers on those boats are paid very low wages. If you offer the equivalent of one year of earnings for the tip, you can probably catch the captains very quickly. Even better: Pass a law to take possession of the boat from these captains/owners. Then the workers can buy/rent the boat with the reward money and get back to work.
- Usually everyone in the fishing villages knows who does it. Often it's not the same people all the time: Individuals may need a larger amount of money than they can get from normal fishing, due to illness of a family member, or necessary repairs to a motorbike they rely on, etc. In a closely knit community you would not report your friend, especially knowing he did it out of desperation.
As far as I know these are not usually larger boats with captains and workers, more single famlilies who own small craft.
- 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.by oasisbob
- 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.
by adjejmxbdjdn - 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.
by tomasphan - 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.
by boringg - This is a very very old technique that predates social media by decades, if not centuries.
Visit Bali and you can find square km's of rubble that used to be reef off the shore of pretty much every beach.
- 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.
by dghlsakjg - 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.
- 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.
- 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.by dmkolobov
- 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?by tescreal
- There are videos of Jacques Cousteau bomb fishing back in the 50's, its nothing new.
- It is easy thus people will do it. Convenience is the single most potent drug we have ever invented.
Man kind - If we can, we will.
by ColdStream - Technically it is a good fishing method. It's quick, cheap, and effective. The damage that's done is mostly unseen by the people fishing.by manarth
- We've done similar things probably since before we were even homo sapiens... or at least as long as we've had control of fire. Setting fire to large areas in order to drive a herd of mammoths of a cliff, for example. Convenient, and much safer than poking angry mammoths with sharpened sticks.by jbotz
- This is the repo if people are interesting in this work: https://github.com/ben-williams-ai/Bomb-Fishingby willmeyers
- 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.by pajko
- Same place, ~200 meters away from my tent: https://i.postimg.cc/5NN9w92m/IMG-20220802-173453-MP.jpgby pajko
- "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.
by pingou - I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?by deadbunny
- You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…by cannonpr
- I love the American measurement units. How many bald eagles of explosives are needed to destroy three football fields worth of reef?by ryandrake
- 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.by wlaw15
- by baruchel
- 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?
by wraptile - Remember a few years ago when the Chinese dive group were killed by bomb fishermen in Indo?