Bomb Fishing Tracked Sonically Across Indonesian Coral Reefs

Healthy coral reefs are a cacophony of purrs, whoops and snaps as fish, shrimp, turtles and more go about their daily business. But on some reefs, a less healthy sound can be heard: the rumble of explosions.

Blast fishing is the practice of tossing bombs into the sea. It kills or stuns everything in its vicinity and often destroys the reef structures that support these rich ecosystems.

The Spermonde archipelago, off the south-western edge of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, is a known hotspot for the destructive practice. But its prevalence has been hard to gauge, until now. An international team has tracked this blast fishing via thousands of hours of ambient sound, all captured by a single underwater audio recorder. The scientists detected thousands of explosions in this data, a process made much quicker thanks to machine learning.

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