Saving Seafood

IUU vessel-tracker shows possible widespread abuse of AIS switch-off capability

June 22, 2021 — A newly launched map of the locations of fishing vessels involved in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing has one big problem: there’s not much to show.

The new tool, the IUU Vessel Tracker, was launched Wednesday, 16 June, by non-governmental organization Oceana. It uses Global Fishing Watch tracking data cross-indexed with a list of vessels linked to IUU compiled by regional fishery management organizations and Norway-based nonprofit Trygg Mat Tracking. But Oceana said the tool, which allows anyone in the world to track the activities of these vessels in near real-time, is currently tracking just two of 168 vessels on the list. The two vessels visible, the Phoenix and the Nadhodka, are flagged to the Seychelles and Russia, respectively.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Hundreds of fishing fleets that go ‘dark’ suspected of illegal hunting, study finds

June 2, 2021 — Giant distant-water fishing fleets, primarily from China, are switching off their tracking beacons to evade detection while they engage in a possibly illegal hunt for squid and other lucrative species on the very edge of Argentina’s extensive fishing grounds, according to a new study by Oceana, an international NGO dedicated to ocean conservation.

Every year, vessels crowd together along the limits of Argentina’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) to take advantage of the lucrative fishing grounds.

By monitoring the ships’ tracking beacons between January 2018 and April 2021, Oceana found that more than 800 vessels apparently conducted nearly 900,000 hours of fishing within 20 nautical miles of the invisible border between Argentina’s national waters and the high seas.

“During this three-and-a-half-year period, there were over 6,000 instances in which these fishing vessels appeared to go ‘dark’ by potentially disabling their electronic tracking devices, known as Automatic Identification Systems (AIS),” says the report, published on Wednesday, titled, Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: Vanishing Vessels Along Argentina’s Waters.

In all, these vessels were “hidden” for over 600,000 hours during which Oceana suspects they crossed over into Argentina’s territorial waters for illegal fishing.

“It’s very suspicious that they have their AIS turned off for such a large proportion of the time they are out fishing,” said Marla Valentine, an ecologist at Oceana, an international NGO dedicated to ocean conservation.

Read the full story at The Guardian