Within just a 17-kilometre radius in one Indonesian archipelago, there is an explosion almost every hour as locals practise “bomb fishing”, destroying coral reefs and decimating marine life. Over 483 days between May 2023 and September 2024, Ben Williams at University College London and his colleagues deployed an acoustic monitoring system at Spermonde Archipelago, south-west of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Oceans are darkening all over the planet – what’s going on?
As well as being a global coral reef biodiversity hotspot, it is a location where fishers detonate explosives underwater, stunning and killing fish that can then be easily harvested. 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 a huge distance underwater.” The recording equipment sat at a depth of 17 metres and was able to detect explosions inside a radius of almost 17 kilometres. The team used AI to analyse their 3650 hours of raw audio.
They recorded 3567 explosions, or just over 23 per day while the device was underwater. One of the biggest issues is that there is an illegal supply chain underpinning the bomb fishing, usually involving the sourcing of fertilisers and fuses or detonators, he says. The best approaches should tackle the illegal supply chain that gets the materials needed to make explosives to bomb fishers or sellers of these,” says Williams.
Bomb fishing is a problem across the tropics, and part of the solution is retraining locals in sustainable tourism and reef restoration, he says. He says he wasn’t surprised at the scale of the problem. He says the new method employed by the researchers might help combat the practice.
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