Indonesian fisheries minister Susi Pudjiastuti is purging the archipelago of foreign-made fishing boats, which she believes are being widely used as fronts for illegal foreign fishing operations.

The action follows a 2015 audit of 1,132 foreign-built boats. Of those, 328 were cited for major infractions, have been “blacklisted” and will be sunk by the government; and 390 were cited for minor infractions and are being asked to deregister. The other 414 have reportedly fled the country.

In a recent interview with the investigative weekly Tempo, Pudjiastuti said that although the boats had appeared to be legitimately purchased from abroad, they were actually still controlled by foreign outfits. These outsiders, she said, had made a practice of establishing “phoney companies” in the archipelago in order to reflag as Indonesian and gain access to the country’s rich fisheries.

“If the purchases are legitimate, where’s the evidence of transfer?” Pudjiastuti told the magazine. “They have all lied.

“We don’t just impose bans. If we make mistakes, we are inviting [the aggrieved parties to file] lawsuits with the state administrative court.”

Many of the purported owners of the boats cited for minor infractions, including the tycoon Tomy Winata, have agreed to deregister; others are still resisting, according to Pudjiastuti. “If further investigated, all of them will be seen as committing fraud,” she said. “Then we could just sink their vessels.”

Deregistered boats will be allowed to “return home,” she added.

Many of the boats that fled are moored in the Thai port town of Mahachai, according to Mas Achmad Santosa, the head of Pudjiastuti’s special illegal fishing task force. He told Tempo that Indonesia would ask Interpol, the international police agency, to assign them “purple status” so their movements could be tracked.

Last year, the head of a Thai fishery association told Tempo that of the 300 Thai-skippered boats that normally operate in Indonesia, “all are owned by Thai fishermen.”

“We are able to [fish in Indonesia] because we only need to look for the right connections,” Praporn Ekouru said. “Our fishermen only need to provide them with the documents needed.”

If enforced, the prohibition on foreign-made boats will put the brakes on an arrangement experts say has allowed illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing to flourish in maritime Indonesia, costing the nation an estimated $20 billion a year and trapping thousands of mainland Southeast Asian migrants in slavery at sea.

Published by Philip Jacobson, source: Mongabay

Governments have been establishing enormous marine protected areas (MPAs) spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometres where fishing is restricted. And the United Nations last June began work developing an international treaty to manage biodiversity on the high seas, the vast stretches of ocean subject to no nation’s law. But how will we enforce paper protections over areas far too big and remote to patrol by boat or plane?

Make vessels, especially fishing vessels, trackable by satellite and the resulting data publicly available, says a group of researchers writing today in the journal Science. Then law enforcement will be able to see in real time which vessels are in a given area and intercept any that appear to be involved in illegal fishing or other activities.

Each year, illegal fishers are estimated to net up to 26 million tons of seafood worth up to $23.5 billion annually, according to a 2009 study. Illegal fishing undermines conservation efforts and is associated with slave labor and human trafficking.

The world’s oceangoing vessels are already part way there. Many carry automatic identification systems (AIS) — devices that transmit data about the vessel’s identity, position, and course that is intended to prevent collisions. Until recently transmission occurred via VHF radio, but recently satellites have begun picking up the job, transmitting mass AIS data to anyone interested in reviewing it, anywhere on the globe.

Groups like SkyTruth, a West Virginia-based nonprofit, are already analysing this data to assist law enforcement officials in apprehending illegal fishing vessels.

The problem, according to Douglas McCauley, lead author of the Science paper, is that fishing vessels often don’t carry AIS devices, and that requirements to do so vary from place to place.

“The International Maritime Organization has done a good job getting member states to require publicly accessible tracking of large cargo ships and passenger ships, but a poor job building coverage for fishing vessels,” McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, told Mongabay.

“The EU is strict, Ecuador and Mauritius require all fishing vessels to do this, but US is fairly lax and Canada doesn’t require any fishing vessels to comply,” he added.

To prove their point that satellite AIS data can help monitor vast stretches of sea, McCauley and his coauthors, including SkyTruth’s chief technology officer Paul Woods, took a look at the data from purse seine fishing vessels on 26 million square kilometers of high seas in the tropical Pacific. The data showed “hot spots of purse seine activity” around Ecuador’s Galapagos Marine Reserve and Kiribati’s Phoenix Island Protected Area.

They also zoomed in on the Kiribati protected area, which is about the size of California, and examined AIS data showing ship traffic there before and after the area was closed to fishing on January 1, 2015. Happily, the MPA appeared to be working well. The data showed plenty of fishing activity before the closure that dropped off sharply after.

Of course, it’s possible vessels were fishing illegally in the reserve that had turned their AIS transponders off, a common practice among fishers that don’t wish to be tracked. Other tricks include falsifying positional data and transmitting inaccurate identification information, according to the paper.

“Unfortunately, current lack of legislative support for AIS has stunted this system into a service that best observes vessels that don’t mind being seen,” the authors write.

Several analytical techniques are now being used to outsmart the cheaters, and even more AIS-capable satellites are scheduled to come online soon, which will improve data access.

But McCauley and his coauthors argue that three new policies are needed to transform AIS into the illegal-fishing-busting machine that it has the potential to be.

First, they write, the International Maritime Organization and its 171 member countries must require all commercial fishing vessels longer than 15 meters and all large vessels to carry “publicly accessible, tamper-resistant” AIS devices. Second, vessels carrying these AIS devices must be required to obtain and maintain unique identification numbers. And third, countries must enforce vessels’ proper use of their AIS devices.

The rewards of such a system wouldn’t be limited to busting fishing scofflaws, according to the paper’s authors.

“If we got to a future where all types of vessels used AIS responsibly the intelligence of ocean management would jump up by 100 IQ points. We could reduce whale ship collisions; zone the oceans to find optima that maximized biodiversity yields, fishery profits, shipping efficiency; track real-time the beginnings of seabed mining…a long list,” McCauley writes in a press sheet sent to journalists.

“Widespread implementation of publicly accessible AIS would efectively bring an end to the era of marine anonymity,” the authors conclude, adding that “failure to close loopholes will continue to foster illegal activities that steal income and biodiversity from developing nations, promote social injustice at sea, and undermine eforts to cooperatively manage the sustained vitality of our shared marine resources.”

Citations
• McCauley, D.J. et al. (2016). Ending hide and seek at sea. Science 351(6278): 1148-1150.
• Agnew D.J., et al. (2009). Estimating the Worldwide Extent of Illegal Fishing. PLoS ONE 4(2): e4570.

Published by Rebecca Kessler, source: Mongabay

For three weeks, a titanium-encased hydrophone recorded ambient noise from the ocean floor at a depth of more than 11 kilometres, in the Challenger Deep trough in the Mariana Trench near Micronesia. Researchers from NOAA, Oregon State University, and the U.S. Coast Guard were surprised by how much they heard.

“You would think that the deepest part of the ocean would be one of the quietest places on Earth,” said Robert Dziak, a NOAA research oceanographer and chief project scientist. “Yet there is almost constant noise. The ambient sound field is dominated by the sound of earthquakes, both near and far, as well as distinct moans of baleen whales, and the clamour of a category four typhoon that just happened to pass overhead.”

The hydrophone also picked up sound from ship propellers. Challenger Deep is close to Guam, a regional hub for container shipping with China and the Philippines.

The project, which was funded by the NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, was designed to establish a baseline for ambient noise in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. Human-created noise has increased steadily in recent decades and getting these first recordings allows scientists in the future to determine if the noise levels are growing and how this might affect marine animals that use sound to communicate, navigate and feed, such as whales, dolphins and fish.

Getting these first recordings wasn’t easy in an underwater trough deep enough to hold Mount Everest.

“The pressure at that depth is incredible,” said Haru Matsumoto, an Oregon State ocean engineer who worked with NOAA engineer Chris Meinig to adapt the hydrophone. “We had to drop the hydrophone mooring down through the water column at no more than five meters per second to be sure the hydrophone, which is made of ceramic, would survive the rapid pressure change.”

While atmospheric pressure in the average home or office is 14.7 pounds per square inch (PSI), it is more than 16,000 PSI at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Researchers deployed the hydrophone from the Guam-based U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Sequoia in July 2015. The device recorded sound continuously over 23 days, completely filling the flash drive. However, scientists had to wait until November to retrieve the hydrophone due to ships’ schedules and persistent typhoons. The device remained anchored to the seafloor until scientists returned.

Another OSU co-investigator on the project, Joe Haxel, will lead a planned return to Challenger Deep in early 2017, where the researchers will deploy the hydrophone for a longer period of time and attach a deep-ocean camera.

Dziak, Matsumoto, and Haxel all work for NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the Acoustics Program located at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Haxel and Matsumoto are also affiliated with the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies in Newport, Oregon. The acoustic project in Challenger Deep is one of a number of projects in which the U.S. Coast Guard partners with NOAA to support scientific research.

Here is what researchers found:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce7-9by7Ty4

Source: Ocean News & Technology