Fishers detonate a bomb every hour on one Indonesian coral reef
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Ben Williams at University College London and colleagues deployed acoustic equipment at 17 metres depth in the Spermonde Archipelago, south-west of Sulawesi, recording 3,567 explosions over 483 days (May 2023–September 2024) inside a ~17 km radius—averaging about 23 blasts daily.
- The team used AI to analyze 3,650 hours of raw audio, marking the first time researchers have quantified bomb fishing at this scale in a known hotspot, Williams said.
- Williams described an illegal supply chain—fertilizers, fuses or detonators, and sometimes stolen mining or military explosives—underpinning the practice, and compared sea-level enforcement to "Whac-A-Mole," arguing the supply chain is the better target.
- Bomb fishing has been documented in 34 countries, from South America to the Mediterranean to the East Coast of Africa and Southeast Asia, according to Williams, who also pointed to retraining locals in sustainable tourism and reef restoration as part of the solution.
- Rinaldi Gotama at the University of Queensland, who has worked with Indonesian NGOs on reefs hit by blast fishing, said he expected high frequency and called the acoustic method replicable elsewhere to identify hotspots and evaluate whether management interventions reduce blasts.
- The study was published in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation (DOI: 10.1002/rse2.70093).
Why it matters: Williams' argument reframes the fight: chasing blast-fishing boats at sea is futile, but cutting off the fertilizer-and-detonator supply chain—and deploying this acoustic method across the 34 countries where the practice is documented—could give enforcement a scalable detection tool that also measures whether interventions actually work.
Ask SkimNews
