yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Defending Marine Wildlife | Explorer


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

NARRATOR: It's the Sam Simon and its crew that are confronting the issues here head on. Of course, their day was a bit frustrating when you see this overwhelming amount of nets that's out there, that there's still the fishermen going out and laying more nets.

NARRATOR: The Sam Simon's primary weapon in their fight against these gillnets is what they call a phantom ray. The ray is set for seven, eight meters.

NARRATOR: The ray is dropped into the water at a set depth. It drags a grappling hook along the sea floor. When the hook catches a net, a thin breaker line attached to the ship snaps. This releases the ray and marks the net's location with a buoy.

MAN (ON RADIO): Sam Simon, Sam Simon, this is Viking. I can confirm for the net. I reckon there's a couple of totoaba in the water there. There must be six, seven carcasses of totoaba floating by us right now. I guess the deal is that they cut the bladders out as quick as possible and throw the rest in the sea. Now we're going to launch the boat and go find out whether it is a totoaba net, or a long line, or any illegal fishing gear that is in these waters. And then we're going to retrieve it.

  • Can I come with you? - Of course.

NARRATOR: The sea shepherd team have managed to scoop up the remnants of that net. And we're on our way to find out what's in it. Surrounded by dead carcasses of totoaba that have been mutilated, its twin bladders taken out. They're everywhere.

PIA KLEMP: One, two. Wow, that's tough, huh?

PIA KLEMP: Yeah, one, two.

NARRATOR: But the totoaba are far from the only victims of these nets. And the nature of the sea, there could be anything in this net. We have been finding everything from sea lions to dolphins to hammerhead sharks. Not too long ago, we saw a whale. And it was almost like an hourglass for how much the net was strangling the whale like halfway through. So it really is a whole load of species that are caught up in this trade for the totoaba. Right? The net doesn't really distinguish who it's going to catch. So whichever animal swims through these waters is sentenced to death.

Oh, here comes the shark.

PIA KLEMP: Oh, no.

GIACOMO GIORGI: Oh, the hammerhead. Oh, Chris, it feels pretty soft.

GIACOMO GIORGI: Is it still alive?

PIA KLEMP: I don't think so. Come here, baby. We are wiping out sharks from our oceans for their fins. In Asia, they eat shark fin soup. And what happens is that a lot of fishing vessels catch a shark, cut their fin, and then throw back their bodies. And finding a dead shark, a dead hammerhead in this net is really heartbreaking.

NARRATOR: But the heartbreak here isn't reserved for marine life alone. As the Sam Simon continues its mission to remove illegal gillnets, the nearby fishing towns suffocate.

[music playing]

More Articles

View All
How YOU Should INVEST $20,000 | Ask Mr. Wonderful #6 | Kevin O'Leary Answers Your Business Questions
Hi Kevin, my question is, what should I do with the 21,000 in my bank account? I’m only 20, and I have 21,000 because of a parent passing away when I was younger. Well, it’s definitely time for another session of Ask Mr. Wonderful! I got dozens of fantas…
3-D Technology Offers Clues to How Egypt’s Pyramids Were Built | Nat Geo Live
My archaeological team actually is very unique because I’m the only ecologist, and the other members are computer scientists, software engineers, and applied mathematicians. We are like a crime scene investigation, patiently documenting with the latest te…
Dua Lipa: The 60 Minutes Interview
Plenty of teenagers want to become pop stars, but few convince their parents to let them pack their bags and move to another country to try and make it big. That’s what Dua Lipa did when she was just 15 years old. She’d taken some singing lessons but didn…
The hidden beauty of the A* algorithm
Why are map applications so fast? If I want to find the shortest path from Prague to Rome, Google Maps tells me the answer extremely fast, in about a second or two. If this were your first course in programming, the answer would be that we can represent t…
How To Survive Quicksand | Primal Survivor
[mud squishing] [groaning] I’ve been watching out so closely for predators that I run straight into something else life threatening: quicksand. Actually, this is a little bit more serious than I thought. [sputters] What makes this dangerous is, if you can…
Solving quadratics by taking square roots examples | High School Math | Khan Academy
So pause the video and see if you can solve for x here. Figure out which x values will satisfy this equation. All right, let’s work through this, and the way I’m going to do this is I’m going to isolate the (x + 3) squared on one side. The best way to do …