Who owns the boats looting the high seas?

the high seas are the wild west of the world's oceans pretty much everything 200 or more miles offshore belongs to no single country corporations profit off fishing these waters with freedom and anonymity overfishing and other damage is rampant but almost impossible to track but thanks to some old tools and new tricks we're finally starting to see who's doing what way out there the fact that we didn't know who they were was shocking a lot of bad behavior can happen on the high seas that's gabrielle carmine a phd student in marine science and conservation at duke university her work focuses on protecting the high seas an assessment of 48 different high seas fish stocks show that three quarters of them were considered depleted or overfished back in 2018 gabrielle was working for jennifer jaquette a researcher at new york university jennifer co-authored a study in 2018 showing that global seafood production actually relies very little on the high seas most of the seafood source there ends up in high-end luxury markets think of premium fish like chilean sea bass and bluefin tuna basically the high seas are being overfished to feed the world's rich the big question hanging over jennifer and gabrielle was who's responsible for what's happening out there countries might set their own rules but nearly two-thirds of the world's oceans lie outside of their jurisdictions we've been thinking about it so much in terms of is thailand doing the right thing is the u.s doing the right thing and now it's time to ask is don juan doing the right thing is starkist doing the right thing and we're offering more evidence in that direction the first step to look for potential overfishing is to track the boats operating on the high seas luckily this has gotten a lot easier thanks to a new hack for old maritime tech most large vessels carry a little box that connects them to the automatic identification system or ais it's a sort of air traffic control for boats each box sends out a radio signal with information about the ship like its id number size course and speed it helps ships avoid colliding with one another and it allows for some tracking from shore ais boxes have a horizontal range of about 74 kilometers but the signals happen to travel upward much further putting them within reach of satellites suddenly ais was a worldwide maritime surveillance network it was a boon for national security interests but environmental groups saw the potential too and in 2014 a couple of them partnered with google to create global fishing watch it was so different a whole new way of looking at who was out there global fishing watch uses ais data to track about 60 000 commercial fishing boats in nearly real time and by following those vessels jennifer and gabrielle started to see patterns of behavior and what we found indeed is that there are vessels that are almost exclusively high seas and that sort of surprised me and these may be the ones that we should be most worried about but building a list of vessels was just step one step two was actually tying the boats to the companies who hired them and profit from them i uh channeled my inner investigative journalist in a lot of ways you know sort of looking at okay we have these vessels we have the name we have the call sign we have all these identifiers of the vessel and then we had an owner attached to that vessel but often what we found is the owner on these vessel registries aren't the actual corporate actor and connecting an owner to a corporate actor was sort of looking to see okay this is a shell company this is not a real company and then if we found who the parent company was that was when we looked into okay does that parent company have a parent company are there sister companies are there subsidiaries you're looking for little puzzle pieces throughout this entire process the process was grueling but they got results gabrielle jennifer and their team recently published a list of the top 10 most active corporate actors in high seas fishing in 2018. the list includes donghuan group which owns the popular tuner brand starkist in total they were able to link about two-thirds of all high seas fishing vessels to their parent companies they also identified players in the game that had previously escaped scrutiny like a company apparently called pacific fishing and supply in hawaii pacific fishing and supply that actually it took me a really long time to sort of figure out who they were i saw this one address keep coming up and i saw that they were all these hawaiian longline fleets there were a bunch of different owners right and i was sort of grasping at straws with these like 20 or so different owners and they all had company names right so i found all the companies that had this address attached to that company and i put that address into google maps and i spent probably a day or so just in street view just walking the street around the block of this one company and just examining what the signage looked like and then realizing that they really are all one company pacific fishing and supply showing up on this top 10 list doesn't actually prove much on its own we don't know whether the boats in question actually overfished or committed other abuses we only know that they were spending lots of time where overfishing occurs plus there are vessels that don't carry ais or that turn them off when they don't want to be seen and there were plenty of boats with parent companies gabrielle couldn't track down but work like this could lead to more accountability for companies other researchers have used global fishing watch to track modern day slavery on industrial fishing vessels they found telltale signs of forced labor in the data like boats spending more time on the high seas and traveling further away from ports these studies could influence negotiations happening this year for a new treaty to protect the high seas and treaty or no they could force companies to answer tough questions from shareholders and consumers in short their shield of anonymity is slowly cracking you know i think the research that we've done is very objective but the question of what you do with it how you leverage it is where um you know there's so your social values kick in what do we want to do with it it's not just my decision it's yours as well as citizens of this world how do we want to mobilize this knowledge and make a difference with it thank you to lexus for their support be sure to check out the new 2021 lexus is by going to lexis.com is their campaign is about going all in on your passion and getting a greater reward which is why they sponsored this series on researchers and innovators they don't influence our editorial but they do help make videos like this viable so thanks again to them and thank you for watching

Channel: Verge Science

Views: 103,168

Rating: 4.8849869 out of 5

Keywords: ocean, fishing, deep sea, sea, ocean life, fish, overfishing, boats, fishing boats, international waters, tracking, satellite, ocean creatures, science, facts, science experiments, amazing, list, experiment, nasa news, nasa, physics, universe, education, space, spacex, mars, elon musk, verge science, the verge, vox, seeker, life noggin, Motherboard, Deep Look, Veritasium, SciShow, ASAP Science, Kurzgesagt

Id: FLnLr-Z2Qi4

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021