Taiwan Fishing Ships Involved in Damaging Indian Ocean Seagrass Ecosystem

TaiwanPlus News

As oceanic fish stocks continue to thin, fishing fleets from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and other nations have descended upon the Saya de Malha Bank, the world's largest seagrass meadow, in the Indian Ocean. In addition to destructive trawling, the deadly harvesting of shark fins may result in catastrophic and irreversible ecological damage.

Transcript

00:00Far off the northeast coast of Madagascar lies the Saya Damala Bank.

00:06It rises from the deep seafloor to shallow depths, creating a unique ecosystem of marine

00:11life in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

00:14It's distinctly shallow.

00:15This is the largest plateau in the world in terms of ocean plateaus.

00:23And in some places it's as shallow as 10 meters.

00:27What that means is that sunlight can reach the floor.

00:30So it's almost like a beachfront, flush with sunlight and lots of creatures.

00:36That's the Saya Damala.

00:37The seagrass that grows here is one of the world's most effective carbon sinks.

00:42The plant captures carbon up to 30 times faster than terrestrial forests.

00:47And the Saya Damala is the world's largest known seagrass field, for now.

00:52Its days may be numbered.

00:54For the past decade, industrial fishing fleets chasing diminishing fish stocks have been

00:59plying the bank's rich waters, pulling up tons of sea life and mowing down the seafloor.

01:06This is a really destructive form of fishing, very common in this area.

01:11It's destructive because it's indiscriminate.

01:13So it's grabbing everything in its path.

01:18And that means you're catching lots of bycatch or species that you weren't intending to consume

01:25or sell.

01:26Turtles, birds, sharks, whales, what have you.

01:29Bottom trawling in particular is destructive because it's on the bottom of the ocean.

01:33It's dragging it across the seafloor, which is essentially like putting a cable between

01:39two Humvees and driving across the Amazon and sort of knocking down everything in your

01:44path.

01:45The trawlers, mainly from Sri Lanka and Thailand, are delivering crushing blows to this delicate

01:51ecosystem.

01:52The bank lies in mostly international waters in the Indian Ocean, administered by the small

01:57island nation of Mauritius, 900 kilometers to the south, which cannot police this vast

02:03stretch of ocean the size of Switzerland.

02:06It makes the Saya Damala an attractive target.

02:09But it's not just the trawlers gobbling up everything in sight.

02:13So the Taiwanese fleet that's there are Taiwanese tuna long liners primarily.

02:18They're largely on the outskirts of the Saya Damala where the water gets deeper.

02:23So the edges of the plateau where tuna are more likely to be found.

02:28Tuna, as you know, is a very high priced target because a lot of types of tuna are already

02:35collapsed.

02:37They've disappeared in many other places in the world.

02:41And the Saya Damala is a place where there's a huge flow of tuna in that area.

02:47But because it's so far, historically other fleets haven't gone there, but the Taiwanese

02:51are now.

02:52But tuna aren't all that the Taiwanese boats are bringing up.

02:55The Saya Damala has an unusual concentration of sharks.

03:01The attraction for fishers, for fishing fleets of sharks is their fin.

03:07Their fin sells mostly to be used for shark fin soup.

03:11And so if you're targeting tuna, you can change your line in a small way and catch both tuna

03:19and shark.

03:20So it's pretty easy adjustment to make and you can bump up your revenue.

03:24So you're seeing a fair number of sharks being pulled onto Taiwanese vessels as well.

03:28And Taiwan, Hong Kong, China are the biggest markets for these fins.

03:33The extent to which Taiwan's tuna fleets are harvesting shark fins isn't fully known.

03:37What is known is that shark populations are under increasing pressure globally with many

03:41species threatened.

03:43And while human beings may have an aversion to sharks, they fill a critical niche in the

03:47health of the ocean.

03:48You know, they're the police of the sort of food triangle and they keep everything in

03:54check because they're apex predators and they eat everything below them.

03:59And so when they're gone, certain players below them can emerge to fill the void and

04:06then sort of knock everything out of whack.

04:09And you can see very rapid collapse of other kinds of species because things get out of

04:16balance.

04:17You lose the top apex predator and the entire habitat can fall apart.

04:23Taiwan has banned shark finning, which usually involves slicing the fins off live fish before

04:28dumping them overboard to a slow, helpless death.

04:32The practice remains profitable enough to make the occasional surprise port inspection

04:36worth the risk.

04:38And buying or selling the fins is legal.

04:40Restaurants openly advertise shark fin, popular in part because its high price carries prestige.

04:47Sharks are just one variable in a complex equation.

04:50Their removal hastens a collapse.

04:53Somewhere along the chain, a massive store of carbon is released from a vast field of

04:58dead seagrass.

05:00Without a cultural shift or effective regulation, human appetites will continue to leave, lasting

05:05scars on the biosphere, perhaps irreversibly.

05:10Patrick Chen and Jonathan Kaplan for Taiwan Plus.

Category

Transcript

Recommended