Fishing With Dynamite Is Harmful—Why Does It Persist? | National Geographic
[Music] You can come out here on a fine morning and you know there'll just be ramp and blasting in areas where there may be tuna feeds, or if there aren't tuna feeds, then they may target the reefs. I would say probably for the last 5 years it's at least as bad, or worse than it's ever been down there.
[Music] When an explosion occurs, there's a big pressure wave that passes through the sea and within a few meters of the blast, it will kill all living creatures. The biggest problem is that it kills adult fish, which are the target, but also all the small juveniles and numerous other creatures that really have no economic value at all.
The ecological importance of reefs, whether it's for biodiversity or whether it's for fisheries productivity, or even for coastline protection and sort of wave buffering, really depends on the three-dimensional structure of the reef. It's a three-dimensional structure that provides a lot of habitat and space for fish eggs and juveniles to hide from predators and to use as a feeding habitat, and so on.
Blasting literally physically destroys the three-dimensional structure of the reef. If you see places where there's been a history of blasting, or even a limited amount of blasting, you'll basically see the reef has been reduced to a rubble field. It's already been widespread for decades. The marine environment is becoming less attractive and certainly from the point of view of providing food for local communities, catches are dropping.
If no action is taken, we're just going to see a continued free-for-all. We'll see continuing decline in fish stocks, we'll see continuing degradation of coral reef habitats. It'll be an increasing security concern as well, as long as there's explosives available to the extent that they are.
[Music] The video you see, you have in one case two free divers methodically swimming a cargo net under a portion of this large monster net that we found and helping to prepare it for transport back to our Ana ship.