Great article from National Geografic that documents the fish kill that is happening in Galapogas (as well as around the world). Ironically the main attraction for diving tourism in the islands are the sharks.
by Jennifer Hile
National Geographic On AssignmentMarch 12, 2004
Jennifer Hile, a correspondent for National Geographic On Assignment, traveled to the Galápagos Islands to investigate illegal fishing and shark fin harvesting by poachers. Here she reveals the difficulties faced by the park rangers fighting the problem.
The 100-foot (33-meter) Guadalupe River patrol boat plows through the southern seas of the Galápagos Islands Marine Reserve, kicking up heavy spray, as rangers scan for poachers.
I thought I was coming to one of the world's most protected and pristine environments. After all, 97 percent of the Galápagos Islands, 600 miles (965 kilometers) from Ecuador, is designated park land: 3,000 square miles (7,880 square kilometers) of land scattered between 13 large islands, six small ones, 40 islets, and countless humps and bumps.
The islands themselves are encircled by a colossal moat—50,000 square miles (129,499 square kilometers) of the surrounding sea is protected as a marine reserve, one of the largest in the world.
About 90 percent of the reptiles, half the birds, and one-third of the plants here exist nowhere else. There's so little fresh water and the volcanic landscape is so inhospitable, only a narrow, unique spectrum of creatures thrive. Deep-diving marine iguanas and tortoises the size of dinner tables gives the islands a fairytale quality.
Cordoning off the islands as parkland was intended to preserve this place, freeing it from the crushing pressures of a burgeoning human population. But within days of arriving, one of my first impressions was of how much impact humans are having on this fragile ecosystem.
Underwater Gold Rush
When the reserve was created by Ecuador in 1959, hardly anyone lived on these islands. An illegal fishing boom beginning in the early 90s changed that permanently.
As more accessible, coastal waters off South America were overfished and emptied, commercial boats zeroed in on the protected waters of the Galápagos.
Fishermen from Ecuador poured in with dreams of easy money, encouraged by commercial boats from Asia paying big money for high-end delicacies like shark fins and sea cucumbers.
Unfortunately, the Ecuadorian government did little to intervene; the problems of such a remote province were easy to overlook.
The local park staff had too little money and too few people to deal with the growing conflict on their own. The aluminum-hulled Guadalupe River was donated in 1995; its clunky engines guaranteed the rangers could never catch anyone.
A grant from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provided new engines and some modern radar equipment, ensuring rangers now move as fast as the poachers. A new seaplane acts as a spotter, scouring vast stretches of sea in a matter of hours, keeping in touch with boat-bound rangers by radio. A California-based conservation group, Wild Aid, helps train and finance rangers.
I'm out on patrol with them to witness the challenges they face and the otherworldly beauty they're protecting.
Patrolling Paradise
For one week, we motor through some of the most inaccessible corners of the Galápagos. It's a journey which reveals both its beauty and its problems. Even with new equipment, trying to patrol such a vast area of ocean is incredibly difficult.
We head for the island of Isabella, considered ground zero for illegal fishing. Much of what rangers do is basic detective work. We jump onto small dinghies and go ashore constantly, looking for camps.
Most of our time is spent cleaning debris from camps where illegal fishermen have already come and gone. We're consistently a few paces behind the people we're supposed to be policing. We collect rusting oil drums, discarded clothes, and rotting batteries from fragile mangroves and lava beds that shatter under our feet like broken glass.
The westernmost island, Fernandina, is considered one of the most pristine islands in the Pacific Ocean. We head for the west coast and hike into the type of wild landscape I've dreamed of experiencing since I was a child.
Sea Sanctuary
Protected lagoons are filled with baby sea lions. They swim right up to my feet, checking me out—the curiosity clearly mutual. Flightless cormorants are building nests of red sea weed on black rocky ground. Green sea turtles rest on the shore and penguins are waddling off for a swim.
All of them are vulnerable to the illegal long lines that crisscross this watery park like spider webs.
These translucent fishing lines, secured with buoys that float at the surface, can stretch as much as 80 miles (130 kilometers), and dangle with hundreds of baited hooks. Long lines are menacing because they are so indiscriminate: Almost any animal will take the bait.
On average fully half of the animals caught on long lines can't be sold and are thrown away—manta rays, sea lions, sea birds. That quickly drains the life from an ecosystem.
But long lines are cheap and easy to use, so they are a tool of choice for fishermen worldwide and illegal fishermen here.
They are hardly visible at the surface, making them incredibly difficult to detect. We didn't find anything along the park's western edge, so we headed for the northern islands of Darwin and Wolf, a favorite haunt for both sharks and the people who hunt them.
Scouring the Seas
At Wolf there is a stunning surprise. Hundreds of dolphins surround our boat. Their abundance is a reminder of how wild these waters still are, but also of what will be lost if this place is over fished. Large populations of dolphins need a lot of food. If what they eat is exploited, their populations also crash.
We finish our patrol on the eastern side of the park. The rangers constantly scan a vast, moving sea with binoculars and find nothing.
Back at park headquarters on the island of Santa Cruz a few days later, the director, Edwin Naula, throws open a shed holding some of the 4,000 shark fins confiscated just in the last year. Galápagos sharks, hammerheads, blues, duskies—all of their distinctive fins are jammed into black burlap sacks that pile to the ceiling.
Shark fins are worth as much as U.S. $80 per pound. The contraband at park headquarters has a market value totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. With that kind of money at stake, fishermen are not going to back out of this reserve quietly.
Three weeks after I arrive in the Galápagos, local fishermen go on strike. They are demanding that long lines be legalized, and threaten violence if it doesn't happen. In the meantime, they've wrapped barbed wire around park headquarters, shutting down patrols.
That leaves the islands completely unprotected.
Whether the Galápagos will remain one of the world's last great pristine places or something closer to a commercial fishery remains to be seen. The current illegal fishing involves too many people fishing too small a place—without any controls, the entire system will crash.
That's what happened in mainland Ecuador, driving people into the Galápagos reserve in the first place.
The same mistakes are now being made in the Galápagos. More money can be garnered over the long run by leaving this place alone and cashing in on tourist dollars, but fishermen who don't speak English and don't stand to profit from tourism are more interested in their immediate survival.
Their determination to peel back the protected status of this place, and the lack of alternatives that makes them so committed to their goal, puts the future of the Galápagos up for grabs.
