November 26, 2013 — Weapons-grade uranium isn’t the only thing Iran may be hiding. The country does not report its fishing catch to the United Nations, which is problematic given that the Persian Gulf, like other areas of the world, suffers from overfishing. But thanks to Google Earth, scientists now know that Iran hauls in more than 12,000 tonnes a year from 728 weirs, large structures built in intertidal zones to trap fish.
In a first of its kind study released today, scientists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver used Google Earth images to calculate how much fish was actually caught by Persian Gulf nations compared to what they reported. The result: The official numbers are nothing but one big fish tale. Researchers Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak and Daniel Pauly estimated the fish catch in 2005, for instance, was 31,433 tonnes, six times what nations bordering the Persian Gulf reported. “Our results document the unreliability of catch data from the Persian Gulf, a small part of a global misreporting problem,” the authors write in the study published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.
“Underreporting fish catches can jeopardize a country’s food security, economy, not to mention impact entire marine ecosystems,” Al-Abdulrazzak told Quartz in an email. “This is particularly important in the case of the Persian Gulf, where fisheries are the second most important natural resource after oil.”
Read the full story at The Atlantic