Dating back to the late 1800s, blast-, bomb- or dynamite-fishing on reefs has been a commonplace practice for ground-fish harvesting in the oceans’ less-developed corners, particularly because, as one might well imagine, it is especially effective.
One well-placed stick of dynamite blasts a whole reef head to smithereens, and just as in the cartoons, the former vibrant reef’s finned inhabitants all float to the surface, in every condition from merely stunned to dead as Julius Caesar—in any case, suffice it to say they’re ripe for the picking.
Of course, as with the fish that rise to the surface, everything else that remains beneath the waves is laid to waste. Everything from the dinoflagellates within corals to the mollusks and crustaceans, sea sponges and echinoderms, and so on and so forth: Anything and everything within striking distance.
The practice of bomb fishing has “been documented in 34 countries, from South America to the Mediterranean to the East Coast of Africa and Southeast Asia,” University College London’s Ben Williams recently told NewScientist. Along with a team of colleagues, Williams installed acoustic monitoring equipment at a depth of 17 meters (~55.5 feet) in a bomb-fishing hotspot within Spermonde Archipelago, southwest of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Over the course of 483 days from May of 2023 to September of 2024, Williams et al. employed AI to analyze their 3650 hours of raw audio to count 3567 explosions, or slightly more than 23 underwater explosions per day. That’s nearly one bomb obliterating a section of reef every hour. And that equipment only registered sound within a 17-kilometer (~10.5-mile) radius.
While conducting dives miles from the impact zone, Williams recounted that “The sound of bomb fishing is so loud that if you’re on a dive it can shake you out of your skin. You feel it more than you hear it. But if you put your head up on the surface, you likely won’t even see the boat responsible because the sound of bomb fishing travels such huge distances underwater.”
Even with the audio evidence, enforcement of the use of explosives at sea is difficult: “It’s like Whac-A-Mole,” says Williams. “The best approaches should tackle the illegal supply chain that gets the materials needed to make explosives to bomb fishers or sellers of these,” he adds.
But the supply chain is wide, involving no shortage of suppliers and multiple types of bombs. Homemade fertilizer bombs are common, and require only fertilizer, fuses, and detonators. Dynamite and military explosives are also stolen from mining sites and military bases, respectively.
And, as you might imagine, it is downright dangerous work. Take a tour through a fishing community within a bomb-fishing hotspot and you’ll likely encounter one or two seafarers with mangled and/or missing appendages. I have.
Rinaldi Gotama, a student at the University of Queensland, Australia who has worked with Indonesian non-governmental organizations in reefs suffering from bomb fishing, said the numbers didn’t surprise him: “I expected the frequency to be high, but studies regarding bomb fishing are relatively scare because it is notoriously difficult to quantify.”
The acoustic monitoring program established by Williams et al. has Gotama hopeful, though. Apart from better informing all too strained law enforcement target bomb-fishing folk, intervention within and training of fishing communities might result in better, more ecologically-considerate practices. And, subsequent monitoring to see whether enforcement and education is proving effective could follow.
Williams et al. hope that, with the (relative) success of their acoustic program in at least documenting and to some degree pinpointing where bomb fishing is occurring, their acoustic method might be scaled and replicated throughout the tropics, perhaps just in time to save not just a reef but a reef break near you…
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