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.

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?

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.

This is the repo if people are interesting in this work: https://github.com/ben-williams-ai/Bomb-Fishing

"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.

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.

There was a short doco on this in a recent Australian show if anyone is interested

https://youtu.be/EXqPHM7Uauk?t=0&si=-W6-z4L8UEo4KtgS

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.

I wonder if there’s a version of Maslow’s hierarchy that applies to countries/societies.

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.

For context, a worth-a-read Wikipedia entry regarding the term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_fishing

Low-cost acoustic sensors paired with community reporting usually beat complex tech solutions when enforcing marine boundaries in remote areas.

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.

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.

I can't believe this is still a thing.

yeah maybe lets not do bomb fishing

Ricidulous fishing in real life

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.

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.

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.

Send them some subsidies from those large American coffers then, and they won't need to

I bet many of the people here moaning and whinging eat fish themselves!