![]() ![]() Despite its substantial harm to fish populations, marine ecosystems, artisanal fishers and coastal communities, unregulated fishing has received little attention in recent years compared to that of illegal fishing. ![]() One of the reasons the authors undertook this work was to more closely examine the unexplored realm of unregulated fishing. Further, unregulated fishing is subject to considerably less scrutiny than regulated activities, and as such, is more likely to be associated with questionable labor practices, human rights violations and other crimes. In many cases unregulated catch is not reported or incorporated into estimates of fishing effort, harvest, or stock status, making it difficult to ascertain whether the fishing is sustainable. Unregulated fishing therefore exacerbates inequity for traditional and small-scale fishers, as well as for developing coastal States that depend on revenue from commercial fishing. They then compared this activity to areas of competence for national and regional fisheries management bodies and squid regulations to determine how much fishing was happening in unregulated areas. To learn which vessels were fishing where and when, the authors combined data from vessels’ automatic identification system transponders and from a satellite technology called the visible infrared imaging radiometer suite, which shows those bright lights on the ocean at night. The study was carried out under a research partnership between Global Fishing Watch, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security and the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency, and focused on four areas: the southwest Atlantic Ocean, northwest Indian Ocean, and the northwest and southeast Pacific Ocean. Those numbers are up 68 percent from the 149,000 vessel days fished in 2017. These units of effort track the number of days vessels are active and equate to around 685 years’ worth of around-the-clock activity. In March 2023, Science Advances published a new study, “ Fishing through the cracks: the unregulated nature of global squid fisheries,” which found that in 2020 squid fishing vessels around the world worked a combined 251,000 vessel days. ![]() Now new research sheds light on this activity-where it is occurring, which countries are doing the fishing, and how much they are catching-and concludes that this sector of the fishing industry needs much greater oversight. But despite that luminescence and the high volume of fishing, many of these vessels are operating in the dark, so to speak, due to limited regulation of the international squid fishery. These lights are so intense that they are visible in images of Earth taken from space, particularly when vessels amass in fertile fishing grounds. A significant portion of this fleet fishes exclusively at night, using an array of bright lights to lure squid toward the surface where they are snagged with barbed lures and hauled on board. Such is the case today with the global squid fishery, which consists of hundreds of vessels fishing for the species, largely in unregulated waters around the world. In the world of ocean conservation, big problems often arise while people are looking elsewhere. ![]()
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