Tougher, harsher and mandatory sentences for environment-related offences are making their way through the legal system; that could send a person to jail for even discarding litter out of the car window.

Fisheries often use extremely destructive methods in order to catch fish. One very common destructive fishing method is by the use of dynamite, often referred to as “blast fishing.”

Blast fishing is one of the most destructive fishing techniques currently in practice.

Jessica Vyvyan-Robinson was diving off Borneo when she was struck without warning by shock waves.

Recently, while leading a dive off the coast of Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, I had my first encounter with the unethical and destructive practice of dynamite fishing.

The Sama Dilaut (also known as Bajau Laut) are a largely stateless maritime community living in the coastal region of the east Malaysian state of Sabah.

Abdul Karim Laing used to be a bomb fisherman. “I started in 1990,” he explains. “My friend was catching a lot of fish – it turned out he was using dynamite and he taught me. I got good at it.”

The Bajau Laut are highly dependent on marine resources both for family consumption and sale. Fishing and gleaning is a way of life for this community and defines their socio-economic and cultural well-being.

Coral recruitment was assessed in highly diverse and economically important Spermonde Archipelago, a reef system subjected to land-based sources of siltation/pollution and destructive fishing, over a period of 2 years. 

This analysis aims to determine the effect of distance between a blast and the hydrophone on the received acoustic energy of the blast signal, purely as a result of the Lloyd’s mirror phenomenon (so excluding the drop in signal energy due to wavefront spreading).

Coral reefs disappear four times faster than the Earth’s rainforests. They cover less than 1 percent of the Earth, and yet support millions of marine plants and animals. They are among the most diverse of communities in our oceans and one of the oldest, having evolved over 200 million years ago.

Fishing and gleaning in the area now within the 350km Tun Sakaran Marine Park has caused stocks of reef fish and other edible species to fall to low levels. Efforts are now being made to reduce exploitation of marine resources in order to protect biodiversity and allow stocks to recover.