November 2, 2022 — When Adhi Tayuh Braka joined one of China’s largest fishing fleets in 2018, he planned to catch tuna, knuckle down and save money to get married.
To pass the time, he photographed his co-workers, their equipment and the fish they pulled out of the western Pacific Ocean. Maybe he’d have some pictures to show his girlfriend back home in Indonesia, he thought.
After two years on the Long Xing 801, though, Adhi wasn’t surprised when the foreman confiscated the deckhands’ phones, then scrolled through and erased many of their photos.
“They were hunting shark,” Adhi, 33, told Mongabay. “They deleted the photos because they were afraid they would leak.”
The vessel Adhi worked on belongs to Dalian Ocean Fishing (DOF), a partially state-owned company that has long claimed to be China’s biggest supplier of sashimi-grade tuna to Japan, a top seafood consumer.
But DOF’s boats have also been the nexus of a massive illegal shark finning operation, an investigation by Mongabay has found, based on interviews with dozens of men who worked as deckhands throughout its fleet of some 35 longline vessels.
Longliners practice a commercial fishing technique in which thousands of baited hooks are dragged through the sea to capture tuna and other fish. But DOF’s boats used banned gear to deliberately catch tens if not hundreds of thousands of sharks each year, including protected species such as the critically endangered oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus).