Nighttime falls on the fishing port of Chimbote, a city on Peru’s Pacific coast in Huarmey province. Almensor Gómez, an artisanal fisherman, prepares to leave home with five fellow fishers. But they aren’t going fishing. Instead, the group will stand guard tonight against poachers who use bombs to fish. Armed with handguns, shotguns “and who […]
Sodium cyanide is a highly toxic chemical compound that many fish collectors in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia (the largest exporters of tropical fish) crush and dissolve in squirt bottles to spray on the fish—and the reef and all the other marine life in the vicinity. Stunned, the target fish can then easily be […]
Strewn in the shallows of the Indian Ocean off Tanzania lie shards of dead coral reefs. Why? Because poor Tanzanian fishermen are using explosives, illegally, to kill hundreds of fish in seconds. Blast fishing, as it’s called, not only destroys large numbers of fish directly—but indirectly as well by killing coral and the rich array […]
Last month, in the Coquimbo region of northern Chile, more than 600 guanay cormorants and penguins were found dead on the beaches. The citizen control that monitors the area reported that on May 10, ten fishing boats were seen approaching the beach opposite the Los Choros ravine. Two days later, the Movement in Defense of […]