Borderless: Why Distant Water Fleets are a Recipe for Environmental Collapse.
HIGH SEAS SERIES | Understanding the consequences of industrial fishing on the high seas — straddling taxa, overfishing, and habitat destruction.
Jeweled bubbles migrate upwards across the sea’s blue layers. They spin, bounce, and move sporadically, eager to reach the surface and see the light of day. They seem to simultaneously travel in unity and act to the beat of their own drum. Each bubble pops and fizzles when it finally reaches its destination. Energetic.
Wonderfully alive.
But there are some outliers in the lively bunch.
Some are driven forward in their dance instead of upward. They sway languidly, lifeless, at the complete mercy of the currents: bubble corpses. Devoid of light and the colors of the rainbow — a sickly translucent.
Yet, ironically, these are the ones that are the fullest of life.
Fish eggs.
Their yolks pulse with a sequestered potential. A powerful potential. They would become big, blue fish with bright yellow fins. Aquatic tanks, invisible to the eye from above the surface due to their color. A fish that seems too large to travel in schools of hundreds. One whose school could create an underwater current of its own.
The Pacific Bluefin Tuna.
The tuna hatchings are first greeted by the colors of The Coral Triangle, just south of Japan. In the earliest stages of their life, this colorful, living scenery flows beneath them like an underwater movie. But with time, the movie screen grows more and more distant; the colors become distorted by the layers of blue ocean and life begins to take a different form. One that is beautiful but monotonous.
The juvenile Bluefins travel east towards what the manmade world considers ‘the west’. There’s comfort in the vast blue, although food sources are few and far between. It’s a simple and efficient journey of adolescence — a pull away from the homeland to something new.
But somewhere along the way, a strange thing happens. An abnormal type of….light? appears to slice through the pristine blue. But it isn’t sunlight. The school is familiar with the designs that the sunlight paints on the water, how the color of dawn, midday, and dusk bleeds through the surface and stains the depths.
The pattern now blocking the school’s path east doesn’t seem like that at all; the color and shape are too bleak and uniform. It doesn’t reflect on their slippery backs as they pass through it. Instead, it falls over them like a poisonous, thread-bare blanket. Limits them.
Possesses them.
Suddenly, a portion of the school begins traveling up, wrapped in the tangible sunlight.
Wrapped in the net.
The captain looks over the side of a large industrial boat and frowns. It needs retouching. That signature bright blue font– M A R I N E R –is peeling and speckled with threatening-looking rust. She’s had a long run; he’s surprised she’s still capable of so much. He can’t deny the boat’s resilience as they haul up what he considers a rather demanding catch.
Pacific Bluefins.
A whole school of juveniles
Their routine never changes. Every year, they travel miles to their perfect, nourishing, spawning grounds in the Sea of Japan to deposit their young: a tried and tested method for sustaining populations through generations. They are creatures of tradition.
Unfortunately, we are creatures of tradition as well.
Over the past five decades, the global population of the Pacific Bluefin Tuna has been depleted by 97.4% They land an average revenue of 800 million USD annually. But they don’t sell alone; both their plight and value are matched by numerous other species caught on the high seas.
Skipjack Tuna. Yellowfin Tuna. Oceanic Shark. Marlin. Billfish. Pelagic Squid.
There is something more to these species — something beyond their value on a plate. They fall into a 99.5%.
The 99.5% of species that are caught on both the high seas and in coastal waters.
That staggering 99.5% presents a problem.
Most species that fall into this percentage can be classified as pelagic — migratory. Each stage of their life, like the Pacific Bluefin’s, is accompanied by a journey across the seas. From birth to adulthood, they move from region to region, reaping the unique benefits of each. Their movement has historically been crucial to their survival and resilience; yet, in the past half-century, it has become their Achille’s Heel.
Their migration–now a plight– builds the foundation for the argument against fishing on the high seas.
An argument that has to do with borders.
Our society operates on borders. They have enabled negotiation between and governance of people and resources for millennia.
So, naturally, when we were confronted with governing resources in the frontier that is the world’s oceans, we applied the same logic. Borders: tried, tested, and successful.
But there was a problem. On land, our resources are isolated and stationary. They can abide by borders.
Fish, on the other hand, cannot.
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Hence, the phenomenon of the straddling taxa was born.
This is how it works.
Say a school of fish traverses a nation’s waters. The nation’s law authorizes fishing to the limit of x individual fish. A fishing boat licensed to be in the waters harvests those x individuals. In time, the school drifts past the 200 nautical miles of national waters and into the high seas.
There, the school is met with a boat like the Mariner. They are fished again. The Mariner can pull as many fish out of the water as international law permits–regardless of how many times the school had been targeted previously.
This is how the separate efforts of high seas and coastal fisheries result in a sort of ‘double fishing’ of migratory species. Limits of the high seas nor EEZs can protect them from the fishing efforts of the other. Migratory fish find themselves in a danger zone; they are harvested with no regard to their various stages of development. They are not only overfished in spite of limits but are also robbed of the opportunity to fully complete their migration and restore their population.
These are the circumstances behind the 97.4% depletion of the Pacific Bluefin over five decades.
The 70% depletion of oceanic sharks and rays over five decades.
The exploitative harvest of a third of the world’s fish stocks as of 2018.
Now, it takes two — both the coastal and the distant water fleets that fish on the high seas — to create this dangerous phenomenon of the straddling taxa. The fault lies in their lack of communication and coordination.
So, shouldn’t they bear the burden of it equally?
If the coastal vessels and distant water vessels were comparable, then yes. But nothing about them is equal. Not their capabilities, motives, flexibility, power, efficiency, vigor. One easily overtakes the other in all attributes. One has the potential to swallow global fish stocks whole:
The distant water fleets that comprise high-seas fishing industry.
“In the past, people couldn’t go after the last fish…now we can.”
— Fisheries Scientist Danial Pauley
Cold, calculated, and extremely efficient–industrial. Distant water vessels are equipped to trawl for hours on end. Equipped with longlines that span 60 miles with 30,000 baited hooks. Equipped with purse seines over a mile in length and 200 meters in depth. Equipped to stay out at sea for up to six months, fishing.
Day and night, fishing.
Fishing on the high seas is more likened to a farm harvest; industrial fishing extracts fish at just as great volumes. But unlike farming, the crop isn’t isolated. Its harvest is constant, its growth unmonitored.
The nets are indiscriminate, ruthless towards both sea life and their physical ecosystems.
Up to 90% of sea life pulled up by bottom trawlers is considered bycatch. Non-targeted species. Accidental catch. A majority of bycatch is unsellable, and hence, discarded. Not released. Discarded. For longlining, that figure exceeds 20%. The global bycatch average, across every type of equipment and every jurisdiction, is 40%.
It’s an abhorrent waste of life.
The destruction of habitat sings a tragic complementary melody. Trawling decimates archaic deep sea and benthic ecosystems. Decades of coral growth and sediment configuration can be destroyed in minutes, the ecosystem’s productivity, diminished. Even seemingly passive, no-contact methods such as longlining leave behind their bloody handprint. A study was conducted through Patagonian Toothfish longlining fisheries in the Falkland Islands. It examined the effect of bottom-set–deep sea– longlining on vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) on the high seas and within the EEZ.
Among its findings was that just like straddling fish species, elements of marine habitats can straddle national borders. They are composed of living structures after all: stony and soft corals, anemones, sponges, urchins, sea fans, hydrocorals. These species create opportunities for both the growth and dispersal of other key species. Sometimes, they disperse themselves.
“VME taxa and metacommunities are maintained by the way of intra- and inter-species ecological processes of competition and predation, as well as local and regional physical processes of oceanographic currents, forcings, and water structures that modulate larval dispersal connectivity” (Brewin 11).
In other words, everything is connected. Mismanagement and exploitation of ecosystem-building species in one area will plague the next in terms of biodiversity, stability, and resilience.
The damage transcends borders.
Like always.
A total of six countries’ distant water fleets account for 77% of the fishing done on the high seas. It is money that drives this six. And power. Both of which their governments crave. So, they build powerhouses out of subsidies. A group of vessels equipped to pull up copious amounts of fish. A group of vessels that can stay out at sea for months at a time. A group of vessels that are essentially hidden–out of sight, out of reach, out of the realms of law. Left to fish for profit at any cost.
This is the contender that fishes on the high seas.
Then there are coastal fishing vessels. They operate within national borders, without the exuberant support from subsidies. They come in a variety, some profit-driven, but many, operating for sustenance for their community. Equipped with only the wealth of their local government.
Distant water fleets and coastal vessels.
They aren’t equal opponents. Either should remain in their respective world. But it is a border between the high seas and national waters that separates those worlds. And the ocean doesn’t obey those. Nor do the shared resources that it houses.
So, who comes out on top? It’s hardly a question.
In the fight for profits, resources, and political dominance, the distant water fleet wins.
And deadly consequences to humanity follow, on either side of the border. In the next article, we explore the way distant water fleets have harmed coastal communities and exploited the waters of developing nations.
Stay tuned.
