The collapse of near-shore fish stocks has driven global fishing fleets to remote waters to feed a world hungry for seafood. The remote Saya de Malha Bank, a shallow seagrass meadow in the Indian Ocean, is being wrecked by destructive fishing practices by the Taiwanese fishing industry and others, threatening the ocean's greatest carbon sink.
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00:00You've probably never heard of the Saya Damala Bank.
00:06But this shallow seagrass plateau in the Indian Ocean teems with life.
00:10It's a breeding ground for blue and humpback whales, sea turtles and other threatened species.
00:16It is also the ocean's greatest carbon sink.
00:19And it is being destroyed.
00:22The bank lies off the northeast end of Madagascar in mostly international waters.
00:27It is about the size of Switzerland, administered by the small island nation of Mauritius,
00:32about 900 kilometers away.
00:35This means fishing fleets can operate there with near impunity.
00:39But one non-profit organization is working to document the destruction of this marine
00:44ecosystem.
00:46We know that there is an unusual concentration of industrial fishing vessels there.
00:52And a huge portion of those vessels are trawlers that are distinctly destructive to the specific
00:58thing, seagrass, that makes the Saya Damala most precious.
01:03That seagrass is precious not only for the habitat it provides for the many species that
01:08dwell on the underwater meadow.
01:10It's a big, very important place, largely because of seagrass' carbon capture potential.
01:15What seagrass does is pulls carbon out of the water that ended up in the water because
01:21the water pulled it out of the air.
01:23And then it holds it, and it stores it in its roots.
01:27The Saya Damala Bank is the world's largest known seagrass field.
01:32These uniquely adapted plants cover less than 0.2 percent of the seafloor, but store around
01:3818 percent of the ocean's carbon.
01:41This is really a silver bullet for climate change.
01:46Seagrass does it faster than anything on land, to the tune of 20 to 30 times faster
01:53than, say, trees in the Amazon.
01:56In search of fish to feed a hungry human world, fleets of fishing vessels have descended on
02:01the area in recent years.
02:03I think what makes it attractive is the biodiversity.
02:07It's rich.
02:08Much of the world's nearshore stocks have collapsed.
02:12Too much fishing, too many fishing boats, and not enough fish close to land.
02:16So ships are going further to more exotic places to try to find the best catch.
02:21And this is a pretty remote place that hadn't been tapped before a decade ago.
02:26But for the last decade, every year, you've been seeing a huge buildup of vessels there.
02:33The unregulated fishing practices around the Saya Damala Bank are ravaging this rare ecosystem
02:39and speeding up climate change.
02:41Fleets from Sri Lanka and Thailand have been operating there for years, and so have those
02:46from Taiwan.
02:47And the Saya Damala is a place where there's a huge flow of tuna in that area.
02:54But because it's so far, historically, other fleets haven't gone there.
02:57But the Taiwanese are now.
02:59There are many parties to this destructive process that puts short-term profit above
03:04long-term global health.
03:06Alex Chen and Jonathan Kaplan for Taiwan Plus.