Fleets of fishing ships are going 'dark' in the South Atlantic.

Since 2018, hundreds of ships have trawled the edge of Argentina's waters, conducting what is suspected of being illegal fishing and obscuring their locations to do so.

Between January 1, 2018, and April 25, 2021, more than 800 fishing vessels spent 900,000 hours doing what appeared to be fishing within 20 nautical miles of the boundary between Argentina's exclusive economic zone and the high sea.

The analysis by Oceana, an ocean-conservation nonprofit, found that 69% of the visible activity was done by more than 400 Chinese-flagged fishing vessels.

In comparison, nearly 200 vessels under South Korean, Spanish, or Taiwanese flags conducted 26% of that visible fishing, while 145 Argentine fishing vessels did less than 1%.
More worrying were the 6,227 "gap events" that Oceana detected over that period, in which vessels were not visible on electronic trackers for more than 24 hours, possibly because they disabled their automatic identification systems.

These vessels were invisible for more than 600,000 hours. Two-thirds of the ships that went "dark" were Chinese-flagged squid jiggers — the most common type of ship in the region — though Spanish trawlers were "dark" more than three times as often as Chinese ships.

Most of the "dark" vessels appeared to have their AIS off for one to four days at a time and mostly disappeared about 5 nautical miles from the boundary of Argentina's exclusive economic zone. (Coastal states have rights to resources within their EEZs, which extend 200 nautical miles from shore.)

"Disabling AIS hides fishing vessel locations from public view and could mask potentially illegal behavior, such as crossing into Argentina's EEZ to fish," Oceana said in its report.

This is the first time the fishing activity and gap events near Argentina's waters have been quantified, said Marla Valentine, Oceana's illegal fishing and transparency campaign manager.

"Fishing at this scale, under the radar, and without regard for laws and sustainability can have detrimental impacts on entire ecosystems, as well as the people and economies that depend on them," Valentine said in a release.

Source: News Alert - Youtube