It took Less than a Minute of Satellite Time to Catch these Thieves Red-handed

The heart of the Pacific Ocean is a vast, barely explored region outside national boundaries, teeming with undiscovered species and dramatic undersea terrain. A few organizations monitor activity here, mostly international fisheries management groups, but it’s easy for a vessel to get lost in the enormous distances. That’s exactly what many pirate fishing fleets depend on.

Though normally we associate the term piracy with rogues who commandeer other people’s ships, it’s also used as shorthand to describe illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing. The Pacific is crawling with fishing pirates. Often their ships are crewed by malnourished slaves who don’t see land for months at a time, a practice that has been documented by rights groups and exposed in a 2015 Associated Press investigation. They make their money by fishing illegally or in poorly regulated areas and then offloading their goods to the crews of large refrigerated cargo vessels called reefers in a process called transshipping. The reefer crews mix their legal catch with the pirate catch and then sell it all in port.

Damage from this kind of piracy doesn’t stop with the abused human crews. It decimates marine life and prevents fisheries managers from regulating the industry using accurate data. That’s why two data-obsessed environmental researchers with the nonprofit group SkyTruth decided to catch some of these pirate vessels in the act. Not only did they succeed, but SkyTruth’s John Amos and Bjorn Bergman did it entirely using satellite data.

Dark ships

Catching the anonymous pirate fishing vessels in uncharted international waters took less than a minute. More precisely, it took a minute of satellite time and three years of complicated signals analysis.

The majority of large vessels on the ocean broadcast their identity and location using the automatic identification system (AIS), which is mostly used to prevent ships from colliding. These days it can also be used to track ship locations, as most AIS data is relayed through satellites. If you want to hide on the sea, the first thing you do is make your vessel “dark” by turning off your AIS broadcasts. What’s interesting about pirate fishing vessels, however, is that they need to rendezvous with legitimate reefers if they want to get paid for their catch.

To find the pirates, Amos told Ars, he and Bergman needed to look for odd patterns in the behavior of reefers. The group partnered with Google and Oceana to found Global Fishing Watch, which maps satellite AIS data. After over two years of research, patterns began to emerge. “Often with reefers they come to a halt in the middle of the ocean,” Amos said. “We don’t see other broadcasting vessels, but we can be confident based on what that ship is doing that they must be rendezvousing with dark vessels.” Bergman created a heat map of suspicious activity, mostly situated off the coast of South America and West Africa, as well as in a relatively lawless region off the coast of Papua New Guinea called the Dogleg.

Certain reefers stood out. They spotted the Panama vessel Hai Feng 648, known to have previously taken illegal transshipments from a Russian pirate fishing ship, lingering oddly off the coasts of Argentina. Meanwhile, the Thai vessel Leelawadee took the same path again and again, traveling between Thailand (already a known source of pirate fleets) and the Dogleg. But then it took a new route, coming to a stop over a region in the Indian Ocean known as Saya de Malha Bank. This is an area in international waters where the seafloor is shallow enough to anchor. It’s the ideal area for a transshipment of illegal fish. The problem was that Amos and Bergman only had the absence of data—the lack of AIS signals from dark ships—to demonstrate illegal activity. What they needed was photographic proof.

Caught in the act

Enter DigitalGlobe, a company with five private satellites. DigitalGlobe Senior Director Taner Kodanaz told Ars that his company likes to devote a small part of its satellites’ time to causes like SkyTruth’s search for pirates. It also happened to have the perfect satellite for the job: WorldView-3, which orbits every 90 minutes, and whose high-resolution cameras can “capture objects that are 1 foot in size.”

Using the maps they’d created from AIS data, Amos and Bergman gave Kodanaz coordinates where they believed the Hai Feng 648 and Leelawadee would be meeting up for transshipments from dark vessels. To get the shots, the WorldView-3 would scan an area that’s about 50 square km and deliver the data back to SkyTruth. The whole process, from requesting the shots to getting the data, would usually take no more than a day. And of course each satellite scan took no more than a couple of seconds. “Sometimes we don’t catch it,” Kodanaz said. But often, they did.

They managed to capture photos of the Leelawadee next to two dark fishing boats, which are likely handing over their catch. “In some cases we’ve been able to see cranes deployed by the reefers that are a strong indication that something is being moved to the reefer,” Amos said. “Sometimes we’ve seen cargo doors open and big bags visible on floor of cargo hold, which suggests fish are being moved or other substances besides just people.”

They also caught the Hai Feng 648 receiving a transshipment near Argentina; and they spotted another member of its fleet, Hai Feng 895, near trawlers off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. It seems almost certain that the Leelawadee and Hai Feng 648 have been receiving unregulated catch from dark ships, storing the booty in their freezers, and selling it at whatever port will buy their haul without asking too many questions.

Ghost nets

Illegal and undocumented fishing might not seem like such a terrible crime, but it leads to long-term problems and abuses. As mentioned earlier, these ships are often crewed by slaves and abused workers, whose plight is easily hidden when the ships themselves are off the grid. But pirate fishing also destroys the long-term viability of fishing in the deep sea.

University of Miami marine biologist Neil Hammerschlag told Ars that the practice makes sustainable fishing impossible, because “we don’t have an accurate picture of fishing intensity” and therefore can’t set reasonable limits on fisheries. Plus, unregulated fishing boats often use incredibly dangerous equipment to fish, like trawlers. Dolphins, turtles, and seals get caught up in these nets along with the target species and are ultimately killed and thrown away. “It’s not like a guy with a rod and reel,” Hammerschlag said. “Trawls are basically underwater bulldozers. When they take up shrimp or crabs, they pretty much bulldoze bottom of ocean and pull up everything. That creates an uninhabitable area for other organisms. You’re kind of putting salt in the fields, and it takes hundreds or thousands of years to grow things there again.”

Even when pirate vessels are gone, they can leave deadly equipment behind. If their nets get caught on something or damaged, they leave the nets floating in the water column. “They don’t biodegrade; they keep killing,” Hammerschlag explained. “They’re called ghost nets, They don’t biodegrade—they drift there and continue to kill forever.”

SkyTruth is hoping to stop practices like this and ultimately help scientists like Hammerschlag get good data on what stable, healthy animal populations look like in the world’s oceans. But stopping fishing piracy is tough, because international waters are regulated by a patchwork of fisheries management organizations, which only have limited power. They can sanction pirate fishing vessels and encourage countries not to buy from them. They can also pressure countries to sign onto anti-overfishing agreements that maintain fish populations at a healthy level. The problem is enforcement. Bergman pointed out that the Hai Feng 648 “previously took squid and jack mackerel from a giant Russian flagged processing ship, the Damanzaihao, which was subsequently blacklisted by the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization.” So the Damanzaihao was blacklisted, but the Hai Feng 648 remains at large.

Amos hopes that SkyTruth’s work with satellite data will help regulators and the fishing industry understand the scope of the pirate fishing problem they face. Satellite data, he said, can provide “potentially world-changing information.” And it’s not just for catching bad guys. Hammerschlag has worked separately with Global Fisheries Watch to do satellite monitoring of ocean preserves where fleets are not allowed to fish. What he found was encouraging. Fishing vessels went right up to the boundaries of the preserves but waited for fish to come out before intercepting them. “They are holding the line, so marine preserves actually work,” he said. With satellite data, he added, “there’s more accountability.”

SkyTruth plans to continue working with DigitalGlobe to track pirates across the globe. “We’re trying to tighten the workflow so we can capture more frequently. Whether we give it to the authorities, or work with the press, we can highlight what’s happening,” Amos said. “In the right hands, this could change the trajectory of how illegal fishing is addressed, so it doesn’t harm the environment and local economies.”

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Source: Ars Technica

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