How much longline gear are we actually leaving in the WCPO?

Continuing with my read on papers tabled at the 22nd Scientific Committee in Apia this August, here is another one I found interesting “An assessment of the quantity of ALDFG in the pelagic longline fishery in the WCPFC Area” WCPFC-SC22-2026-EB-WP11, by Keith Bigelow, Aurélien Panizza, Tiffany Vidal and Raymond Clarke,.

I have been circling the ALDFG topic (Abandoned, Lost or Discarded Fishing Gear) for a while now, mostly from the purse seine and FAD side, because that is where the attention has been. Drifting FADs are visible; they wash up on reefs; they have a constituency of angry people photographing them. Longline gear does not. It is monofilament; it sinks or drifts sub-surface; nobody films it; and, as a result, the assumption in the region has quietly been that longlining is not much of an ALDFG problem… and as someone who did longline for a living and thinks it is a very unique type of gear, I can confirm that it is.

This paper is the first serious attempt I have seen to test that assumption with actual observer data across multiple flags in the WCPFC Convention Area, and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no.

What they did

The authors pulled twenty years of observer records, 2005 to 2024, from two very different sources. The first is the SPC/FFA Regional Observer Pollution Report, the GEN-6 form, submitted by eleven CCMs (the FFA membership plus French Polynesia). The second is the Pacific Islands Region Observer Program, PIROP, covering the US longline fleets based in Hawaii and American Samoa. Thirteen CCMs in total had to individually authorise the release of their data, which is not a trivial bit of diplomacy and deserves acknowledgement, because both datasets are confidential.

That gave them 9,864 observed trips. To my knowledge, nobody has combined GEN-6 and PIROP at this scale before.

The headline: ALDFG was reported on 4.8% of trips, 477 of 9,864. But the split between the two data sources is where it gets useful. GEN-6 trips reported incidents at 8.7%, PIROP at 2.2%. That is a fourfold difference, and it is not because Pacific Island flagged vessels are dirtier. It is because PIROP observers do not record deliberate gear discard at all, only loss and abandonment. Take discards out of the GEN-6 numbers, and the two datasets converge. Of the 844 total incidents, 587 were discards, 189 were losses, and 68 were abandonments. In other words, the majority of what shows up in the regional data is gear being deliberately thrown over the side as a means of disposal.

That single fact reframes the whole issue for me. This is not primarily a story about the sea taking gear from fishers. It is a story about waste management.

Why gear is actually lost

The paper does something I appreciate: it categorises the drivers rather than just counting incidents. They could assign a possible driver to 257 incidents. Half of them, 49%, came back as unknown, which tells you plenty about the state of the forms. Of the rest, the dominant cause of loss is the mainline parting and the vessel then being unable to find and retrieve the gear, 23.3% of cases. The secondary cause is not being able to locate the terminal radio buoy to haul back in reverse, 4.6%.

Here is the number that stopped me. In the Hawaii and American Samoa fleets, the mainline parts on 44.5% of all sets. Nearly half. That is routine, not exceptional. The standard response is to locate the next segment, tie the mainline back together and carry on hauling, and most of the time that works. Loss only occurs when it does not. So the frequency of parting is very high, and the conversion rate into actual gear loss is comparatively low, which is a useful thing to understand if you want to intervene.

For abandonment, the leading driver is a large gear tangle that makes recovery impractical, 14.7%, followed by interaction with a drifting object, 13.2%, which observers almost always recorded as a dFAD… so the two problems are not separate.

The paper also notes that modern GPS/AIS longline buoys are far better than radio beacons for finding gear, that the Hawaii fleet typically runs five or six of them per set, and that radio beacons are now hard to source anyway because direction finders are difficult to procure. That is an obvious mitigation lever sitting right there.

The estimation, and its honesty

To get from observed incidents to a regional number, the authors worked at the set level rather than the trip level, which makes sense. A set is a fairly consistent unit of about 2,500 to 3,000 hooks, whereas observed trips in the dataset averaged 43,394 hooks and ranged from 20,036 to 206,642. Then they ran a Monte Carlo simulation, sampling each distribution 5,000 times, and scaled the result to the annual WCPFC-CA longline effort, which averaged 756 million hooks over the period and peaked in 2012.

The honest part is what they do about all the sets where the observer recorded nothing. Rather than pretend to know, they ran four scenarios. Scenario 1 assumes every set in a trip has ALDFG. Scenario 2 assumes only one set in fifteen does, and the rest have zero. Both are explicitly labelled implausible and are there to bracket the answer. Scenarios 3 and 4 sit in between and are the ones the authors consider realistic.

Under Scenario 4, which assumes one set in fifteen at full ALDFG and the other fourteen at 25%, the WCPFC-CA is losing roughly 135,355 km of mainline and branchline per year, weighing about 1,408 metric tonnes, along with 9,852 buoys and around 2.08 million hooks. Scenario 3 roughly doubles that.

I like that they published the bracket rather than a single confident number. The upper bound, Scenario 1, is over 6,000 tonnes. The lower bound is 404 tonnes. That spread is the honest measure of how little we know.

Ten times lower than the global estimate

The most consequential finding is the comparison with Richardson et al. (2022), the study that surveyed 451 fishers globally and is widely cited for gear loss rates. Richardson's longline numbers were 3.33% of mainline, 3.58% of branchlines and 2.86% of hooks lost annually. This study's Scenario 4 gives 0.30% of mainline, 0.39% of branchlines and 0.39% of hooks. Roughly ten times lower.

Two readings are possible, and the paper does not pretend to resolve them. Either interview-based global estimates are overstated, which Richardson's own 2021 paper on methodological challenges would allow for, or observer coverage in the WCPFC is so thin and so spatially unrepresentative that the real regional figure is much higher. The authors lean toward the second as a real risk.

Longline observer coverage under CMM 2018-05 is only required to be 5%, coverage was below that for years, COVID knocked it back further, and only in 2024 did all nine reporting CCMs hit the 5% mark. And observer monitoring specifically for ALDFG is lower still than headline coverage. Nobody should be quoting the Scenario 4 number as settled.

There are also gear assumptions doing quiet work here. Everything is calculated assuming 4.0 mm mainline and 2.1 mm branchline, based on the Hawaii fleet. Vessels using 3.5 mm mainline or 1.8 mm branchline would push the tonnage down. And for discard volumes reported by observers in buckets and partly filled 50 kg rice sacks, the team physically obtained end-of-life gear in Honolulu and weighed it to build the conversion. I find that detail quite cool, as I remember weighing individual bait plastic bags on a study on waste we did a few years ago, but also a fair indictment of the reporting forms.

Ports are not always the solution

The last section is the one I would push hardest at the Commission. Seven CCMs interviewed at the last annual session (American Samoa, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, South Korea, Marshall Islands, Tonga, Solomon Islands) reported that unusable longline gear simply goes to land because there is no alternative.

Port surveys in Pohnpei and Majuro found something instructive. For purse seine gear, a functioning private sector system already exists. Local firms collect, consolidate, store and ship webbing and floats offshore for recycling; municipal dumping is prohibited, and some webbing gets reused locally for fencing and hammocks. For longline monofilament, nothing. No collection infrastructure, no recycling outlet, no agency with the mandate or budget.

That gap is the discard driver. If there is nowhere to put end-of-life monofilament in port, the incentive is to leave it at sea, and remember that discards were 587 of the 844 incidents in this study. Honolulu shows the alternative works: the Center for Marine Debris Research and the Hawaii Longline Association run a bin, CMDR sorts and de-metals the line, and some goes to H-Power for waste-to-energy at no cost to the fleet.

The eight recommendations

Raise longline observer coverage with a timeline toward 100%. Build ALDFG indicators into electronic monitoring, which is the only realistic path to representative data. Extend GEN-6 reporting into the full ROP and beyond the FFA, French Polynesia and US to the distant water fleets of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, whose gear currently sits entirely outside this analysis. Update the GEN-6 form, unchanged since 2014, replacing the free text comment field with tick boxes for reason of loss. Train observers specifically on ALDFG. Look at FFA observer journals, which the team was not authorised to access. And work on port reception facilities.

My own reading is that recommendations to expand the ALDFG reporting to additional WCPFC fleets carry the most weight. Right now, the biggest longline fleets in the region are invisible in this dataset.

As for disposal onshore, I refer to the plastics study we did: why do Pacific Island ports have to deal with the externalities of the LL fishery? Particularly considering that the main culprits are the DWFN? We examined the potential to off-load waste at several Pacific Island ports, and I quote: “The picture is grim: of the five fishing ports in the region that were looked at, only one – Suva in Fiji – has access to a landfill facility that is in any way compliant with any desirable standards. The other four nations – the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands – struggle with their own local waste management to varying degrees, and their landfill facilities are mostly already overwhelmed. Adding foreign commercial waste to existing domestic waste is not a viable solution where that is avoidable. While some fishing vessels do operate out of Pacific Island ports as a home base (e.g. one company in the Marshall Islands and another in Noro, Solomon Islands) and have to dump their waste in local dumpsites, the majority of fishing vessels are actually foreign-based, and materials that are now waste were once provisioned onto those vessels either at overseas ports or from carrier vessels. 

Perhaps we should think along the lines of what I discussed on FADs. My personal view is that we are treating it as a “waste management” issue, centred on disposal and limited recycling, which happens at the end of the problem and shifts the burden onto those who did not cause it… and this is simply not right.

So we need to see it from the perspective of “reverse logistics” that differs from traditional waste management in that it adds a “value” to recovering and repurposing products and routes while respecting the internationally recognised UNCLOS principle that the country to which a fishing vessel belongs is responsible for all the actions of the vessel, including the waste produced by that vessel.

I think we should consider a targeted “waste-bond” system that combines a deposit on longline gear with a recoverable payment for verified retrievals, creating a market signal that turns abandoned gear into an asset rather than waste.

The gear loss question is genuinely hard. The gear disposal question is not.

Effort creep in the WCPO purse seine fishery: the 2026 update

Continuing with my interest in the papers going to the 22nd Scientific Committee of the WCPFC in Apia this August, I want to look at one that sits right at the intersection of science, management and money: the annual update on indicators of effort creep in the purse seine fishery. The paper is WCPFC-SC22-2026-MI-IP01, by Paul Hamer and Thom Teears of SPC's Oceanic Fisheries Programme together with the PNA Office.

I remember when having a chopper was a worry on creep… good old days

Why this paper?

The Vessel Day Scheme is an effort control. You do not limit the tonnage of skipjack a vessel takes; you limit the number of days it can spend fishing. That works beautifully as long as one fishing day keeps meaning roughly the same volumes of fish caught. The moment a day catch “drifts” towards catching more fish than it used to over time, that assumed limit quietly loosens without anyone changing a number in a management measure.

That drift is what fisheries people call ”effort creep”, which is an area I've been interested in for a while (particularly when it comes to dFADs but also on longline). Creep comes in two types: the direct kind is more sets inside the same day, more nominal effort squeezed into the unit you bought. The indirect kind is each set becoming better at catching fish, through gear, electronics, skipper skill, better information, better networking. The first is easy to count. The second is genuinely hard.

Paragraph 2.4(ii) of the VDS text obliges the Administrator to brief the Parties annually on catch, effort and any observed or potential increase in average effective fishing effort per day since the scheme started. SPC has been producing this analysis with the PNAO since 2016, when Pilling and colleagues first set out the candidate indicators. This year's version runs complete data from 2007 and 2008 through 2024, with some observer series into 2024, and the authors recommend it supersedes earlier versions because data inputs get refined over time.

The fishing day and the VMS

Before getting to the results, there is a data story here that deserves attention from anyone working in MCS, because it is a nice example of reported data going quietly wrong.

Since around 2010, the raised logbook estimates of fishing days have become increasingly biased low. The reason appears to be misreporting of vessel activity codes, specifically what would previously have been logged as searching now being logged as transit. Searching is fishing effort. Transit is not. Under the VDS, a day spent steaming from one FAD to another is a fishing day, and it gets charged as one. So a fleet that codes its searching as transit ends up looking, in the logbook data, like it is fishing far fewer days than it actually is. And if you divide sets by an artificially small number of days, you manufacture an apparent increase in sets per day. In other words, the bias runs in exactly the direction that would create a false effort creep signal.

Since 2022, SPC has instead derived fishing days from VMS, applying criteria based on position and vessel speed to identify searching and active fishing. Those VMS days line up much more closely with the days recorded under the VDS. They run higher than VDS days, which is not surprising given the VDS claims process for non-fishing days, but the trend and variation track well. 

The team recommends continuing with VMS days and refining the algorithms using observer data for ground truthing. Work to correct the historical logbook record is ongoing, though the paper is honest that progress in 2024 and 2025 has been limited by staff turnover in SPC's data management team and competing priorities.

For me, this is the quiet headline. A core management indicator was being distorted by reporting behaviour on the vessel, and it took an independent data stream to notice and correct it. That is a good argument for keeping multiple sources rather than trusting the logsheet alone.

What the indicators actually show

The analysis excludes archipelagic waters of PNG, Solomon Islands and Kiribati, since effort there is not under the VDS, and filters to 20N to 20S, dropping the smaller domestic fleets of Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Results are presented separately for PNA waters (PNA EEZs plus Tokelau) and everything else.

On nominal effort, sets per fishing day in PNA waters sit consistently just below 1.0, with a very slight declining trend since 2008. That is the opposite of what you would expect if vessels were cramming more sets into each purchased day. Outside PNA waters, the rate is lower and more variable, with a flat long-term trend. Observer data, which only counts days when sets were actually made and therefore gives higher values, tells the same story. Between roughly 15 and 30% of active fishing days in PNA waters involve more than one set, and 5 to 25% outside. There was an uptick in 2024, tied to a big jump in unassociated sets, and the authors note a slight increasing trend may be emerging, but nothing sustained.

On effectiveness, catch per set for total tuna shows no long-term trend since 2007 for either set type, in either area. Associated sets consistently produce about double the catch rate of unassociated sets, which is unsurprising given how many free school sets come up empty. Comparing 2023 and 2024 against 2021 and 2022, catch per set was down 1 to 2%, while catch per day was up 8% in PNA waters and 18% outside, all within the range of variation seen since 2008.

Vessel characteristics are similarly stable. Length, gross tonnage and horsepower have moved between zero and 1% a year since 2007. Well capacity is the outlier, up 16% between the two recent periods. The authors make the sharp point that VDS day charging by vessel size is itself a brake on hull growth, so the fleet has stopped getting bigger and started getting smarter instead.

The creep that already happened

Here is where the paper gets more interesting to me. When the authors extend the catch per set series back to 1990, a clear increasing trend appears for associated sets from 1990 to about 2007, and then it flattens. Unassociated (free school)  sets show no such trend in either period.

That rise maps onto the transition from drifting logs to human-made drifting FADs as the dominant associated set type, which was made possible by cheap satellite tracking buoys. Their conclusion is that the most important period of effort creep in the history of this fishery happened before the VDS came in. By the time the scheme was implemented, the big efficiency jump had already been banked into the baseline.

Which raises the obvious question: why did the acoustic FAD buoys that came later not produce another jump?

The authors offer two explanations. One is that the technology may be less useful than assumed, giving a coarse presence signal rather than a reliable biomass estimate, and that its real value may lie in cutting steaming time and fuel cost rather than lifting catch per set. Also, a vessel can only set on FADs it can actually reach, and it has no control over where its FADs drift, including into EEZs where it has no access or no days. You cannot cherry-pick the best buoy if you cannot get to it.

The second explanation is management. The package introduced from 2007 by PNA and WCPFC- the VDS limits and pricing, FAD closures, high seas effort limits, more restrictive access, and the shift from roaming distant water fleets to domestic fleets fishing mostly at home- brought a pace of change beyond anything seen in other tuna fisheries. 

The comparison is telling. In the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the FAD share of catch has climbed to around 80%. In the WCPO, it has sat at around 50%, with roughly 70% of sets still made on free schools. Something is discouraging the switch that happened everywhere else.

The caveats worth keeping

The authors are careful not to oversell a null result, and neither should we.

Stable catch rates are not proof that nothing is happening. If efficiency gains are running against declining stock, the two can cancel out and leave a flat line. Purse seining is also highly selective, which makes catch per set prone to hyperstability, holding up even while a stock moves. That is why the catchability proxy matters: skipjack catch per day divided by assessed biomass. Against the 2025 assessment, which shows relatively stable spawning biomass since around 2010, that proxy is flat for PNA waters and very slightly increasing outside. Notably, this is weaker evidence of creep than the 2022 assessment gave, which showed around 2 % per year.

Aggregation also hides things. These are regional numbers, and the paper is explicit that individual flags or EEZs could show patterns the aggregate does not, which is precisely the sort of analysis a PNA member might want for optimising returns on its own day allocation.

And FADs remain the big data gap. Escalle and colleagues estimated 31,000 to 39,500 buoy deployments a year in the WCPO between 2016 and 2019, against roughly 11,000 associated sets in 2024. Most deployed buoys are never set on. The number of FADs a vessel is actively monitoring on any given day is plausibly a real component of fishing effort, and it is not captured anywhere in this analysis. SPC is building a FAD database off the back of PNA logbook reporting, and the authors recommend adding deployment and monitoring indicators in future updates.

What SC22 is being asked to note

The invitations to the Committee are modest but pointed. No clear evidence of effort creep since VDS implementation. Clear evidence it occurred before, during the drifting FAD transition. Recognition that the policy package may itself be constraining creep. Continued VMS work, continued logbook correction, and a suggestion I think deserves attention: review the role of this paper in relation to the WCPFC skipjack management procedure, since the MP now changes how VDS limits get adjusted rather than leaving them to periodic renegotiation of the Tropical Tuna Measure.

The finding that effort creep is not undermining the VDS is, as the authors themselves say, contrary to what might have been predicted. That is worth a lot of thinking about.  It suggests the scheme, along with the FAD closures and access controls around it, has done something that effort-based management is generally assumed to fail at. But it is a finding held up by indicators the paper openly describes as imperfect, resting on data streams that have already been shown to drift. 

Keeping it honest depends on better FAD data, better activity reporting, and continued willingness to check the logsheet against the VMS.

The Western and Central Pacific tuna fishery in 2025

Every August, the Scientific Committee of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission sits down to work out many of the science challenges for the year ahead, (at least partly) the numbers from the year before, and this year's overview paper, put together by Tiffany Vidal, Thomas Ruaia and Freddie Heather, tells a fairly clear story about 2025. After a record-breaking 2024, the fishery pulled back across almost every measure: catch, value, and the economic conditions underpinning the main fleets.

The headline number is the total tuna catch from the WCPFC Statistical Area, which came in at a provisional 2,588,945 mt for 2025. That is about 472,000 mt below the 2024 record of just over 3 million tonnes, though it sits close to the 2023 level of 2,685,724 mt. So rather than reading 2025 as some new low point, it looks more like the fishery reverting to its recent normal after an unusually good year.

We still dominate the global tuna supply. The WCPO catch represented 72% of the total Pacific tuna catch and 49% of the global tuna catch for the year, and unlike other oceans, the overwhelming majority of that catch, 86% in 2025, is taken inside the waters of Pacific Island coastal states rather than on the high seas.

Catch (mt) of albacore, bigeye, skipjack, and yellowfin tuna in the WCPFC-CA, by longline, pole-and-line, purse seine, troll, and other small-scale gear types

Skipjack remains the backbone of the fishery. The 2025 catch of 1,668,409 mt made up 64% of the total, but that was about 393,000 mt down on the 2024 record. Yellowfin came in at 677,123 mt (26%), continuing a gentle decline from the 2021 record. Bigeye actually went the other way, up 9,146 mt to 155,864 mt (6%), and albacore fell to its lowest level since 1993 at 87,549 mt (3%).

The purse seine fishery is still the biggest part, taking 69% of the total catch by volume in 2025 at 1,787,386 mt, a drop of around 359,000 mt from 2024's record. Skipjack made up 76% of that purse seine catch, yellowfin 20%, and bigeye 4%.

What stands out in the detail is how much of the story is about where the fish were, not just how many there were. The fishery has been shaped for the past five years by persistent La Niña conditions, with a brief wobble toward El Niño in early 2025 before La Niña reasserted itself for the rest of the year. That kept effort concentrated in the western side of the WCPO, particularly around PNG, FSM and the Solomon Islands, a pattern reinforced in 2024 when PNG cut licensing fees to draw fleets into its waters.

The Pacific Islands flagged fleet, now 167 vessels and the largest it has ever been, continues to be the dominant force in the fishery, taking well over half the region's purse seine catch on its own, though even this fleet saw a slight downturn in 2025 after its record 2024.

One technical detail worth flagging for anyone who watches catch rates: there has been a documented shift in how vessels report transit days versus searching days on their logsheets, which is quietly inflating the nominal CPUE figures reported in this and other papers. The authors flag this explicitly, so any casual reading of "catch rates are up" needs that caveat attached.

Bigeye catches in the purse seine fishery jumped 42% in 2025 to 63,579 mt, the highest since 2018, driven by a heavier reliance on drifting FAD sets, which rose from 17% of all sets in 2024 to 32% in 2025. That is a meaningful swing in fishing strategy within a single year, and it shows up clearly in the size composition data too, with FAD-associated catches skewing smaller and more mixed-species than the free school sets.

Pole-and-line had a rough year, with the 2025 catch of 103,588 mt the lowest since the early 1960s. Japan's distant water and offshore fleets, still the mainstay of this gear type alongside Indonesia, saw catches drop 5% as the fleet itself shrank from 61 to 57 vessels. This is a slow, structural decline that has been running for decades now, driven by the economics of pole-and-line relative to purse seine rather than any one bad season.

Longline told a similarly downbeat story. The 2025 catch of 218,014 mt was below the ten-year average, with bigeye at its lowest since 1983 and albacore down sharply too. The Japanese and Korean distant water fleets continue to shrink (Japan's bigeye catch has fallen from 20,725 mt in 2004 to just 2,702 mt in 2025, alongside a vessel count that's dropped from 366 to 62 over the same period), while the Pacific Islands domestic albacore fleet keeps growing its share of the South Pacific albacore catch, now taking 57% of it compared to a third back in 1998.

Prices were a mixed bag through the year. Skipjack recovered somewhat after a rough 2024, with Thai import prices up 8% to $1,641/mt and Yaizu prices edging up 2%. Yellowfin and bigeye prices moved in different directions depending on the market and product form, fresh versus frozen, Japan versus the US, with US fresh yellowfin import prices actually falling 18% even as frozen product from Japan rose 16%. Albacore had a rough year in the US market, down 23% after a record high in 2024.

Put all the catch and price movements together, and the total delivered value of the WCPO tuna catch fell 5% to $5.4 billion in 2025. Purse seine still accounts for 57% of that value despite an 11% drop, while longline actually grew 9% to $1.18 billion and pole-and-line grew 13% to $230 million on the back of a big jump in albacore volumes. Skipjack value fell 15% to $2.7 billion even as the other three species all grew in value, a reminder that skipjack's sheer volume means its price and catch swings dominate the headline economics of the whole fishery.

The part of this paper that will matter most to anyone thinking about the industry's near-term prospects is the economic conditions indexes, which track fish prices, fishing costs and catch rates against a 20-year baseline. All three of the major fisheries went backwards in 2025. The tropical purse seine index fell to 80, well below its long-run average, driven mainly by a real decline in catch rates that outweighed cheaper fuel and slightly higher fish prices.

That is a sharp reversal from 2024, when the index sat at 109 on the back of strong catches. The southern longline fishery fell to 79, and the tropical longline fishery to 74, both weighed down by falling catch rates and, in the tropical fishery's case, persistently low fish prices as well.

None of these numbers is catastrophic in isolation, but the direction across all three fisheries in the same year, after several years of relatively favourable conditions, is the kind of signal that tends to get noticed at the coastal state level given how much of the region's fisheries revenue flows from access arrangements tied to these fleets. And i’m sure the fuel costs have had their share of influence on this slowdown.

Away from the big three gear types, the paper also captures a genuinely large shift in how Indonesia's handline fishery is being reported. After a 2024 handline workshop, Indonesia was able to properly split its large-fish handline catches from its small-fish hook-and-line catches for the first time, and the result was a big jump in the reported large-fish handline catch, to 176,314 mt in 2025, about 62% of it yellowfin. The authors are careful to note this looks like a reporting artefact rather than a real change in the fishery, but it is a good example of how much of what looks like a trend in these annual reports is actually a data collection story.

On the billfish side, most species tracked lower in 2025 than 2024: blue marlin down to 9,257 mt, black marlin down 44% after a record 2024, striped marlin down slightly. Swordfish in the South Pacific held roughly steady at 18,501 mt, still dominated by the EU-Spanish fleet.

Taken as a whole, 2025 reads as a fishery cooling off from an exceptional 2024 rather than one in trouble, but the simultaneous decline across catch rates, prices in several key markets, and the economic indexes for all three major gear types is worth watching into 2026, especially with forecasters now flagging a potential swing toward a strong El Niño later in the year, which would reshape where the fish, and the fleets chasing them, end up.

Joseph Conrad on the minds of the men I fished with

I was sent a picture from my fishing days in the late 80s… surely not one I should be proud off… but I’ll never deny who I was, and the things I did… it would be silly at any stage. The friend that took it is now retired, and he rejoiced in the life I lived and where I am now, while he stayed in Mar Del Plata fishing all the way to retirement.

Made me think about the perception of many fishermen being like pirates, people that rejoice in pillaging the seas, without any alliances to any place or anyone… I think it is far from that.

It made me go back to the opening pages of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Marlow (the protagonist) is introduced by an unnamed shipmate:

He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them, the ship; and so is their country, the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings, the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself.

Conrad was a seaman before he was a writer, and it shows.

That “stay-at-home order” of mind is exactly what I found on board. The boat is the home and the sea is the country, and everything else glides past.

It is not stupidity; it is a survival setting. You cannot carry the whole world into a cabin you share with four men whose every body noise you hear from less than a metre away.

Sharing one after a good trip…. 1988

I have written before that I got into fishing partly because I did not fit anywhere else, and that life at sea sorts people out fast.

Either you deal with it, or you never come back, and that is fine; we respect that.

What holds it together is not affection. I fished with people that had views I despised, yet I would still take them as crew tomorrow, because trust and liking are different things, and only one of them keeps you alive.

Conrad’s disdainful ignorance is, I think, a way of managing what a paper on fishers’ mental health I read a while ago calls the traditional risks…. the weather, the hours, the danger, the missing family, the hope of coming back.

What Conrad’s seaman had no defence for is the modern uncertainty, the criminalisation and demonisation… my own daughter, as a child, telling a friend I was a fisherman… but a nice one.

That one still stings my soul.

The sea is always kind of the same. It is everything ashore that keeps changing.

7,288 longliners, and the ones we can't count

The good people at ISSF put out another excellent technical report this month that I've just had time to properly sit down and read. Josu Santiago pulled together the authorised longline vessel records from all five tuna RFMOs, ICCAT, IOTC, IATTC, WCPFC and CCSBT, as they stood in June 2026, and matched them against each other. That sounds like a hardcore data-cleaning exercise, so my respect for his work is very high!

We got two here!

Long-time readers will know I have a soft spot for longline. I fished it, I wrote my thesis on selective bait for the snapper longline fishery, and I still reckon it's the most physics- and chemistry-driven of all the gear (depth, thermocline, chemoreceptors, bait chemistry, branch line spacing, all of it).

So this is not me having a go at the gear. It's me having another go at how little we actually know about the fleet that uses it.

The reports find that across the five RFMO registries, there were 9,084 authorised longline vessels on paper. Once you strip out the duplicates (the same vessel sitting on more than one RFMO's list) that comes down to 7,288 unique boats. One in five records was a repeat, and unsurprisingly it's the bigger, more mobile vessels doing the repeating.

Here's the number that matters most to me. Vessels 24 m or longer are only 31% of that fleet by count, 2,283 boats, but they carry 86% of the estimated fishhold volume. So almost seven out of ten vessels on these registries are, in capacity terms, close to irrelevant, while a relatively small club of large-scale longliners is doing almost all the actual catching and carrying.

And that club is dominated by the usual DWFN, China, Chinese Taipei, Japan and Korea; between them, they own 59% of the large-scale fleet by numbers and 78% of it by fishhold volume. China alone has 601 vessels of that size, with roughly 229,000 m³ of hold capacity between them. That's more than any other flag by a wide margin.

What vessel counts tell us

Here's the part that will not surprise anyone who has worked in this region. Most RFMOs don't require small and medium vessels to register at all. IOTC and WCPFC use a 24 m cut-off. IATTC's large-scale longline rules also apply only above that length.

ICCAT is the one exception, as its Mediterranean requirements pull in a lot of smaller boats, which is why its registry looks so different from the other four.

This means Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, all strong small-scale longline nations, barely show up in this data because their small-scale fleets simply aren't on the books. Hence, fishhold volume should be more vital than vessel counts whenever this comes up.

It's not a nicer statistic to quote; it's the only one that gives you an honest read on what a fleet can actually land, given that the vessels missing from the registries are, almost by definition, the small ones.

The IMO number problem, again

40% of all registered longline vessels have no IMO number. That drops to under 4% once you look only at the large-scale fleet, which is something, but it still leaves a chunk of the fleet where you genuinely cannot tell if the boat on one RFMO's list is the same boat sitting on another under a different name or flag.

Santiago falls back on national registration codes to catch duplicates where the IMO is missing, which is a fair workaround, but it's not the same as a proper universal identifier, and we've known that for a long time now.

The report is also upfront about something I have noticed before: these registries record vessels authorised to fish, not vessels actually fishing. That distinction matters more than people give it credit for.

A vessel can be authorised across all five RFMOs and only ever operate in one of them or in none. The co-occurrence numbers here are a good illustration: 1,191 large vessels are registered in just one tRFMO, 861 in two, 137 in three, 72 in four, and 26 boats authorised in all five at once.

My take

I like to think that Santiago's ISSF report is the solid paperwork side of the complexity of MCS for the longline fleet… If most of the fleet never has to register, and 40% of what does register has no reliable identifier, then of course MCS can't keep up. The fleet is built, almost by accident, to be hard to see.

The 86% of capacity sitting in 31% of vessels is also worth sitting with for a moment. Every time an RFMO reports a fleet reduction in terms of vessel numbers, it can look like real progress while barely touching actual fishing capacity, because the boats that are easiest to drop off a registry are usually the small ones with next to no hold volume anyway. If we're serious about managing capacity, hold volume and gross tonnage need to be the numbers on the table, not just headcount.

None of this means longline is the villain. Done properly, it's still one of the more selective ways to catch a mature, high-value tuna or swordfish, and I'll defend that all day. But “done properly” depends entirely on being able to see the fleet, and this report is a useful, if slightly depressing, reminder of how much of it we still can't.

Santiago's excellent recommendations- mandatory registration for the smaller vessels, universal IMO numbers, and dynamic registries that track who's actually fishing rather than who's merely authorised- are not new, yet remain partially implemented.

What this report gives us is a clean, quantified baseline to hold the industry and RFMOs to next time they claim progress on capacity reduction based on fleet size by number of vessels

The Snapper That Never Makes to the stock assessment

A few weeks ago I wrote about what happens to the fish that swim away, the new study on post-release mortality in the SNA 1 snapper fishery. That piece looked at the fate of released fish, roughly a fifth of them dying anyway despite swimming off looking fine. I have since gone through the full Fisheries New Zealand assessment report behind that study, and there is a second story in it that deserves its own space: how much snapper actually gets caught in this fishery, as opposed to how much gets counted.

The short version is that the recreational snapper fishery across East Northland, the Hauraki Gulf (Auckland included) and the Bay of Plenty is enormous, and most of what gets hooked never gets weighed, logged, or reported anywhere. It just goes back over the side. The official harvest numbers that feed into stock assessments and catch allowances only see a fraction of what actually happens on the water.

Where the data came from

The study, led by Jade Maggs and colleagues from Earth Sciences New Zealand and Blue Water Marine Research, ran from January 2024 to January 2025. Interviewers worked at eleven boat ramps from Mangōnui in the north down to Whakatāne in the Bay of Plenty, catching private trailer boat fishers as they came off the water. Trained observers rode along on charter boats out of nine ports covering the same stretch of coast. Between the two sectors, they recorded 24,013 individual snapper: 16,921 from private boats across 1746 sampled outings, and 7092 from charter boats across 240 sampled trips. For each fish they logged length, capture depth, where it was hooked, and whether it was kept or released.

That is a serious amount of fieldwork, and it is worth saying so because the resulting numbers carry real weight.

More than 60% goes back

The headline figure is that 62% of snapper caught by private boat anglers were released, and 69% of snapper caught on charter boats were released. Most of what gets released is undersized: 84% of the private boat releases and presumably a similar pattern on charters, since 53% of all private boat catch and 60% of charter catch was below the 30 cm minimum legal size.

Put plainly, for every legal fish that ends up in a chilly bin, roughly one and a half to two more get caught, ideally measured against a ruler, and put back (or kept until a bigger one is caught)

That release rate held up fairly consistently across all three regions. It eased off a little in winter in the Hauraki Gulf and Bay of Plenty, when more of the fish around happened to be legal size, but the underlying pattern of high release rates was there everywhere the researchers looked, from the Mangōnui boat ramp in the far north to Whakatāne in the east.

Scaled up to the whole fishery, private boat anglers released an estimated 903 tonnes of snapper over the year, 2.1 million individual fish. The Hauraki Gulf, unsurprisingly given how much fishing pressure it carries around Auckland, accounted for the bulk of that at 551 tonnes, followed by the Bay of Plenty at 210 tonnes and East Northland at 142 tonnes. Charter boats released a further 207 tonnes, 462,000 fish, again concentrated in the Gulf. Add the two sectors together, and you get somewhere around 1110 tonnes of snapper, 2.6 million fish, handled and returned to the water across SNA 1 in a single year. 

That is close to three-quarters of the entire commercial Total Allowable Commercial Catch for the stock, caught and released by recreational fishers alone.

What the official numbers actually measure

Here is where the second, less discussed part of the story comes in. New Zealand's recreational catch statistics for SNA 1, the ones that feed into the Total Allowable Catch and the recreational allowance, come primarily from two sources: the National Panel Survey (NPS), a periodic survey of private fishers, and the Amateur Charter Vessel (ACV) database, which charter operators are required to fill in. Both of these systems are built to estimate landed harvest. What gets weighed at the ramp, what gets logged by the skipper. Neither was ever designed to capture the fish that get thrown back.

The 2022-23 NPS put the private boat snapper harvest at just over 1.3 million fish, 1514 tonnes. The ACV database recorded 237,141 snapper landed by charter boats that year. Add those together, and you get a landed harvest of roughly 1.54 million fish, a bit under 1800 tonnes. That is the number that shows up in the official accounts.

But when Maggs and colleagues combined their catch characterisation data with those harvest figures, to work out the actual total number of snapper being caught (kept plus released), the picture looked very different. 

Their model put total private boat catch at close to 3.44 million fish, about 2518 tonnes. Total charter boat catch came out around 699,000 fish, roughly 488 tonnes. Combined, that is somewhere in the order of 4.1 million snapper actually being caught across SNA 1 in a year, against an official landed harvest figure of 1.54 million.

In other words, the landed harvest numbers that management decisions are built on capture only around a third to two-fifths of what is genuinely being caught. The rest, well over half, exists only in this kind of dedicated at-sea survey, and even then only because someone thought to go and measure it.

I want to be careful here. This is not a story about unreported fishing or people hiding their catch. Nearly everything being released is being released because the law requires it: undersized fish, fish over the bag limit (yet you argue what you kept fishing, then). The system is doing roughly what it was designed to do. The point is narrower and, I think, more interesting: an enormous amount of fishing mortality and fishing pressure simply does not appear in the data that gets used to judge how healthy a fishery is or how much room there is to move on catch limits. If you only ever count what comes home in the bin, you are missing most of what the fishery is actually doing to the fish stock.

Why that gap matters

This is where the two threads from my earlier post and this one come together. SNA 1 carries a Total Allowable Catch of 8050 tonnes, split between a commercial allowance, a recreational allowance, a small customary allowance, and a 450 tonne allowance for everything else, illegal take, ghost fishing, and mortality among fish that are returned to the sea.

This study put annual release mortality, fish that swim away but die anyway from barotrauma or hook damage, at 200 tonnes for private boats and 48 tonnes for charter boats. Combined, that is 248 tonnes, on its own accounting for 55% of the entire 450 tonne allowance for other mortality, an allowance that is also meant to cover the much larger commercial fishery's own sources of unaccounted loss. The number of individual fish involved was around 582,000 snapper a year, dying after being carefully unhooked, measured, and returned to the water by anglers who almost certainly believed they were doing the right thing.

None of that 248 tonnes shows up as harvest anywhere. It is not landed and is not eaten. It simply disappears from the stock, invisibly, inside a number that until this study was, in the authors' own words, "somewhat arbitrary."

Most of that mortality risk traces back to two things: how deep the fish was hooked from, and where the hook ended up. Fish caught from medium and deep water die at much higher rates than fish caught in the shallows, and a fish that is gut-hooked or foul-hooked is far more likely to die than one hooked cleanly in the lip. 

The good news buried in the data is that the great majority of snapper across both sectors, 88% on private boats and 95% on charters, were lip hooked, which is the main reason the overall mortality rate is not far worse than it is.

The incentive gap again

I made the point in an earlier piece about the Fisheries Amendment Bill debate that incentives, not intentions, tend to drive outcomes in fisheries. That argument was mostly about commercial discarding, but it applies just as cleanly here. Under the current settings, there is no cost attached to catching a fish you are not allowed to keep, so there is no real incentive to avoid catching it in the first place. Fishers fish the same grounds, use the same rigs, and simply sort the legal from the sub-legal fish at the rail. The 4.1 million fish being caught each year is not a sign of fishers doing anything wrong. It is the predictable result of a management system built around size selectivity rather than encounter rates, applied to a stock that has recovered strongly enough that undersized fish are now everywhere on the upper east coast.

A fishery that is mostly invisible

What strikes me most reading through the full report is how much of this fishery's real footprint sits outside the numbers we normally use to talk about it. SNA 1 is often described, rightly, as the biggest recreational fishery in New Zealand, and the landed harvest figures are already substantial. But the total number of fish handled, measured, and returned to the water each year is more than double what gets landed. That is not a criticism of fishers, most of whom are simply following minimum size and bag limit rules that were designed decades ago around very different assumptions about what "release" costs the fish. Yet it is a criticism of their noisy opposition to any change.

It is a reminder that fisheries management built entirely around landed catch is, by construction, managing only part of the picture. The rest, the fish that get caught, judged too small, and sent back, has real biological consequences, and until surveys like this one go out and count it directly, it stays off the books. Good management needs to see the whole fishery, not just the part that ends up in the chilly bin.

Can EM Monitor labour rights on board?

This paper became the second half of the study I wrote about last week. The first part asked whether human fisheries observers could reasonably be expanded from data collectors into monitors of labour and human rights abuses at sea and concluded that the idea runs straight into the same power imbalance and safety risks that already make an observer's job dangerous. This second paper picks up where one first left off and asks a more technical but no less important question: if not observers, then what about cameras?

Electronic monitoring, or EM, isn't new to fisheries management; it's been quietly working its way into commercial fishing fleets for the better part of two decades. What began with Vessel Monitoring Systems tracking GPS position has evolved into full onboard camera rigs paired with gear sensors, winch and hydraulic pressure monitors, and increasingly capable machine learning that can help identify species and estimate catch size from footage. The paper draws a useful distinction that's easy to gloss over: E-Reporting (ER) is an "open" system that still relies on people typing into electronic log sheets and offloading records and observer reports submitted digitally. E-Monitoring (EM) is a "closed" system by design, with sealed, tamper-evident equipment that doesn't accept manual input and can't be talked out of what it recorded. That distinction turns out to matter a great deal once you start thinking about labour compliance, because a closed system is much harder to bribe, intimidate, or pressure into looking the other way than a person is.

That's the appeal in a nutshell. Human observers, however professional, get tired, need to sleep and eat, can only be in one place on the vessel at a time, and, as the first paper set out in some detail, can be subject to intimidation, corruption, or worse precisely because they're isolated on someone else's boat for weeks at a stretch. A camera doesn't get tired and can't be bought a drink. It also doesn't get to decide, on a bad night, whether reporting something is worth the risk.

But the paper is careful not to oversell EM as a silver bullet, and I think that caution is the most important part. Cameras have real limitations. Current technology still can't reliably determine the sex, age or species composition of a bulk catch sample the way a trained observer can. Blind spots are unavoidable on complex vessels unless the camera setup is extremely elaborate, and elaborate setups cost money. Crucially, none of the footage means anything without skilled analysts on land who understand the fishery, the vessel type and the processes on board well enough to interpret what they're looking at; the technology doesn't replace expertise; it relocates where that expertise is applied. For all these reasons, the paper's honest conclusion is that EM complements observers rather than replacing them outright, at least for the foreseeable future.

Where the paper does more original work is in mapping out what it would take to extend an EM system, built for fisheries science and compliance, to also cover labour standards. It's a genuinely practical roadmap: how to engage stakeholders who each see EM differently (a coastal state losing licence revenue if distant-water fleets flee to the high seas to dodge cameras is a very different worry from the ILO wanting a workable global standard); how to define minimum technical standards so systems from different vendors are comparable; how to structure a programme, whether through a single vendor or a certified-standards model; and how to grapple with cost, video review alone typically accounts for about half of an EM programme's budget, a sobering figure for anyone assuming cameras are the cheap option, albeit the raise of AI… yet the usefulness of AI on labour rights, is a whole paper in itself.

The paper also gets specific about which labour-focused capabilities could realistically be bolted onto an existing EM system. Crew identification via facial recognition at embarkation and disembarkation could help close a real regulatory blind spot: workers who join and leave vessels via at-sea transfers from carrier ships, far from any port authority's oversight. From there, calculating days at sea and actual working hours becomes a fairly straightforward extension, particularly on longliners, where most of the work happens on deck, where cameras already point. More ambitiously, the paper suggests EM-supported grievance mechanisms, with reported complaints logged alongside time and location data so they can't simply be dismissed as no proof, no problem.

None of this comes without real friction, and the paper doesn't pretend otherwise. Privacy is a genuine and legitimate concern; fishing vessels are cramped, crews already have almost no personal space, and being recorded around the clock is a real imposition that needs to be handled with actual limits on placement and use, not just reassurances.

Cost recovery is politically sensitive: someone has to pay for all this hardware and analysis, and industry pushback over who foots the bill is predictable. And there's a coordination problem baked into the whole exercise. Coastal states, flag states, RFMOs and vendors all need to move roughly in step, or fleets will simply drift towards whichever waters have the least monitoring.

What I find most useful about this paper, on a second reading, is that it doesn't ask EM to solve everything on its own. Its real argument is that EM already has a proven track record in fisheries data and compliance, so the technical and institutional case for expanding it into labour monitoring isn't a leap of faith; it's an extension of something already tested.

The genuinely honest caveat, though, is that nobody had actually piloted EM for labour purposes at the time we wrote this. The gap between "technically plausible" and "demonstrated to work" is exactly where the paper leaves things: recommending a proper pilot run in partnership with the ILO, flag and coastal states, and the fleets themselves before anyone claims cameras have solved a problem that people have struggled with for decades.

Should Fisheries Observers Ever Be Labour Rights Monitors Too?

After writing on the new FAO publication regarding labour, I was asked why we were not using fisheries observers for labour issues… this is not a new idea; in fact, a few years ago, together with my friend Osvaldo Urrutia, we wrote a study for a UN agency project that posed a question many keep returning to: could the fisheries observers already working on fishing vessels around the world be turned into monitors of labour and human rights abuses at sea?

It's a tempting idea. Working conditions on fishing vessels are notoriously hard to monitor, and observers are already out on the water. Why not ask them to watch for crew rights as well as their fisheries work?

Being Osvaldo a well-known fisheries jurist, the paper we did spends a lot of time on the legal plumbing before getting anywhere near an answer, and that plumbing matters. Under UNCLOS, the flag state, the country whose flag a vessel flies, bears legal responsibility for what happens on board, including labour conditions. The 2006 Maritime Labour Convention set global minimum standards for seafarers, but it left fishing vessels out entirely, which is why the ILO built a separate instrument, the Work in Fishing Convention (C188), to cover things like signed work agreements, rest hours, food, water, medical care and repatriation for fishing crews. On paper, the coverage is there. In practice, flag states are often unable or unwilling to enforce it, especially for distant-water fleets operating far from home and rarely inspected.

That enforcement gap is exactly why observers keep being proposed as a potential fix. UNCLOS itself only mentions them in passing; coastal states can require observers on foreign vessels fishing in their waters, but the convention says nothing about what those observers are for, or even about their legal status on board. That vagueness left it to individual countries and regional fisheries bodies to build their own observer programmes from scratch, and the paper walks through four of them to see how far the role has stretched in practice: New Zealand, Chile, the Philippines, and the WCPFC, which manages tuna fisheries across a vast stretch of the high seas.

The differences between them are revealing. Chile keeps its observers strictly to a scientific data-collection role; the law defines them explicitly as researchers gathering data for conservation and management purposes, full stop, with no compliance function at all. New Zealand goes further than any of the others, with observers who support fisheries compliance monitoring and, in some circumstances, even take on a labour-monitoring role, but only when specifically delegated by the labour inspectorate, not as a standing part of the job. The Philippines and the WCPFC's regional programme sit somewhere in between, with observers supporting fisheries compliance but nothing formally built in for labour or human rights monitoring. Across all four, the pattern is the same: observers were designed to gather biological data, compliance monitoring was added later as a practical necessity, and human rights monitoring has essentially never been formally attempted anywhere.

That gap isn't an oversight. It's the paper's central finding, and it stems from a hard, practical problem: the same isolation and power imbalance that make an observer useful also render them vulnerable. A 2020 Human Rights at Sea survey of observers working across the WCPO found that just over half had experienced harassment, abuse, violence or interference on at least half of their trips, and fewer than one in five said they'd never experienced it. Psychological and emotional abuse was the most common complaint. Roughly a third of respondents were dissatisfied with how their reports of these incidents were handled.

I wanted to shorten one section of the paper here because it captures the core dilemma better than anything I could write fresh:

Observers, like anyone, bring their own sense of ethics to the job, and their isolated position on board leaves them open to corruption; captains sometimes allege observers ask for bribes to look the other way, just as observers can be pressured or bought off. Crew may also not see an observer as independent enough to trust with reports of intimidation or abuse. These risks aren't hypothetical: conflict is common in a setting defined by a stark power imbalance, and there have been reports of observers dying in suspicious circumstances while doing their jobs. Some experts (and I) argue observers should be pulled back to a purely scientific role and relieved of compliance duties altogether, and I argue for splitting the functions entirely, leaving observers to the science and letting electronic monitoring (EM) handle compliance. Either way, any reform of observer programmes has to reckon with what it does to observer safety and whether the system still works, and it's genuinely unclear whether observers are even the most efficient use of scarce monitoring funding compared with the technology now available.

That's really the crux of the whole paper. There's no legal barrier stopping a state from expanding an observer's mandate to cover human rights monitoring; New Zealand already shows it's technically possible. But possible isn't the same as wise.

Every extra compliance power handed to an observer raises the stakes of the power imbalance they're already navigating alone, on someone else's boat, weeks from shore, with no colleagues, no easy exit, and often no reliable way to report if something goes wrong.

Layering a human rights watchdog role on top of that, without fixing the underlying vulnerability, risks making the job more dangerous without making the monitoring more reliable.

The paper doesn't conclude that observers are impractical for this role; it argues for caution and for treating electronic monitoring as a genuine complement rather than an afterthought, particularly for the kind of transhipment and long-haul longline operations where abuses are most often reported, and observer coverage is thinnest.

If we're serious about protecting the people working on fishing vessels (fishers and observers), the fix isn't just deciding who gets a new job description. It's building a system (cameras, reporting channels, jurisdictional cooperation between flag, port and coastal states, etc.) that doesn't quietly ask an isolated person on the wrong side of a power imbalance to carry the whole weight of it.

Progress in Advancing Decent Work in Marine Fisheries — Part 2: What's Actually Working

In Part 1, I introduced FAO's new Technical Paper No. 751 on decent work in marine fisheries, and mentioned that one of its authors, Blaise Kuemlangan, is a friend I've known since 1998, a friendship built on more fisheries conversations than either of us probably wants to count.

Having covered the report's diagnosis of the problem, I want to use this second post to talk about the part I found most useful: what states and regional bodies are actually doing about it, and where I think the report's honesty about the limits of these efforts is its real strength.

Ratification Isn't the Only Path Forward

One of the more encouraging threads running through this report is its documentation of countries that haven't ratified ILO Convention No. 188 but have built equivalent, or in some cases stronger, protections into their own domestic law anyway. The Republic of Korea and Chinese Taipei are both discussed at length; Taiwan can't formally ratify ILO conventions given its political status, but it has built out a comprehensive legal framework covering foreign crew recruitment, labour standards, and social insurance that closely tracks the Convention's requirements. Indonesia is doing something similar, layering sector-specific regulation for fishing vessel crew on top of its general labour law, even while ratification and full implementation remain a work in progress.

I found this genuinely important, because it pushes back against the idea that a convention's ratification count is the only meaningful measure of progress. It isn't. What matters is whether the standards actually reach the fisher on deck; and the report does a good job showing that this can happen through several different legal doors, not just one.

The Coordination Problem — and Some Real Fixes

If there's a villain in this report, it's institutional fragmentation. Fisheries agencies, maritime authorities, and labour ministries in most countries operate in their own silos, with almost no routine data-sharing between them. A labour inspector might have no idea a vessel has a history of safety violations; a fisheries officer working on PSM might have no mandate, or training, to recognise the signs of forced labour even if they're staring right at them. (Albeit right now I’m working with the great crew of the iMCSn to change this last bit… more to come soon)

What I liked here is that the report doesn't just diagnose this; it names country-level fixes that are demonstrably working. Brazil's system of cross-checking crew rosters between its Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Defence during vessel inspections. Thailand's Port-In Port-Out control centres, which coordinate the navy, labour officials, and port authorities to catch trafficking and check crew documentation as vessels move through port. Indonesia's joint inspection protocols between its fisheries and manpower ministries. Namibia's newly launched National Coordination Mechanism, set up specifically to oversee ILO Convention No. 188 compliance across three different ministries at once. FFA’s HMTCs tie up licensing to minimum contract standards aligned with C188…

None of these is a perfect system, but they're proof that the coordination problem is solvable with the right institutional will, and that's a message national agencies genuinely need to hear.

The Regional Fisheries Bodies Are Starting to Move

The section of the report I found most consequential concerns Regional Fisheries Management Organisations; bodies like the WCPFC, ICCAT, and others that manage high seas fish stocks. These bodies have traditionally treated labour conditions as entirely outside their remit, focused purely on stock conservation. That's been changing, slowly and with real resistance from some member states.

The landmark moment the report documents is the WCPFC's adoption, in December 2024, of the first-ever binding conservation and management measure addressing crew labour standards, a measure that took roughly four years of negotiation to land, and won't take effect until 2028. (I wrote about my insider’s take on it here) It requires flag states to meet minimum labour conditions as a precondition for licensing, obliges port states to facilitate disembarkation of crew reporting abuse, and creates information-sharing requirements around crew recruitment providers. Other bodies — ICCAT, NAFO, the North Pacific Fisheries Commission, the South Pacific RFMO — have followed with their own non-binding resolutions built on similar principles.

This resonates strongly with something I've argued in the chapter I wrote for the Oxford University handbook of Human Rights at Sea: that no single instrument or institution is going to solve this problem on its own. What we actually need is a networked approach, international organisations, flag and port states, regional bodies, industry, and fishers themselves all pulling in the same direction, imperfectly but persistently.

The report's account of RFMOs edging into labour governance, often starting with something as narrow as observer safety before broadening into full crew standards, is a textbook example of that kind of incremental, networked progress.

Where This Leaves Us

The report closes without pretending there's a silver bullet. Its recommendations are the ones you'd expect from people who've actually worked this problem for years: ratify and implement Convention No. 188 more widely, strengthen interagency coordination at the national level, keep pushing regional fisheries bodies to treat labour as core business rather than an add-on, and use port state measures more deliberately as a lever for detecting and deterring abuse.

None of that is flashy. But having read Blaise and his co-authors' work here alongside my own thinking on this subject, what stands out to me is the shared conviction that decent work in fisheries isn't going to be delivered by one treaty, one agency, or one campaign. It's going to be built the way most durable maritime governance is built, slowly, through overlapping layers of law, regional cooperation, and enough political will at the national level to actually enforce what's already on the books.

For anyone working in fisheries management, labour inspection, or ocean governance more broadly, this report is worth the read … not because it has all the answers, but because it maps the terrain honestly, and points toward the places where real progress is genuinely being made.

Progress in Advancing Decent Work in Marine Fisheries — Part 1: Why This New FAO Report Matters

I've spent most of my working life around fishing vessels, ports, and the people who make the seafood industry run, and if there's one thing that has stuck with me through decades in this sector, working on aspects from the welfare of sharks and cetaceans to bycatch mitigation, compliance, data, and 1000 more issues, and it's how slowly the world has moved on protecting the fishers themselves.

So when FAO released its new Fisheries and Aquaculture Technical Paper No. 751, Progress in advancing decent work in marine fisheries: challenges in the evolving legal and policy framework, I read it with more than professional interest.

Part of that interest is personal. One of the report's authors, Blaise Kuemlangan, is someone I've known since 1998. That's over a quarter of a century of crossing paths at FAO meetings, technical workshops, and the kind of late-night conversations about fisheries law that only two people who actually care about this stuff would have. Blaise has spent his career quietly building the legal architecture that underpins fisheries governance, and watching his name attached to this report, alongside Ke Song, Julia Nakamura and Daniela Kalikoski, felt like watching a thread I've followed for years finally being pulled together into something comprehensive.

I've written about the human dimension of offshore fishing myself, in a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Manual of Human Rights at Sea. So reading this FAO report felt less like discovering something new and more like seeing an institution catch up, properly and rigorously, with problems that those of us working at sea and in ports have been flagging for years.

Building on a Decade-Old Foundation

This report doesn't appear out of nowhere. It's explicitly a follow-up to FAO's 2016 scoping study on decent work in fisheries and aquaculture, and then the draft Guidance on Social Responsibility in Fisheries and Aquaculture Value Chains I co-wrote with Katrina Nakamura in 2019 and did no progress through the COFI process at the time becuase it was seen as too prescriptive in their language by the USA delegation.

But specifically, it responds to a specific recommendation from the fifth FAO-ILO-IMO Joint Working Group on Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing, held in January 2024. That Working Group asked FAO to help develop guidance for national fisheries agencies on implementing ILO and IMO instruments governing fishers — and this report is part of the response.

 In any case, what struck me about this report is the argument: that decent work and the fight against IUU fishing are not the same… yet they can be deeply entangled. Vessels that cut corners on crew safety, wages, and living conditions are very often the same vessels cutting corners on catch reporting and licensing compliance. However, I would be the 1st to recognise that this is not a given in my own experience; I worked in Argentina under some of the best protections known to fishermen while doing very doggy stuff

 In any case, strengthening monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) systems and the tools we already use to fight illegal fishing can simultaneously protect the people on board. That's not a new idea to those of us who've done port inspections, but seeing it stated so clearly in an FAO technical paper matters, because it gives national fisheries agencies a legal and practical hook to act on.

Why Fishers Are Different

The report makes a serious effort to explain why marine fishers can't simply be treated as a subset of seafarers or lumped in with land-based agricultural workers. Anyone who has spent time fishing in the last couple of decades knows this instinctively, but it's worth spelling it out: months at sea, limited communication, no real access to healthcare, and a crew member's near-total dependence on the vessel master's goodwill. Add to that the reality that many fishers are non-nationals recruited through opaque, multi-country arrangements, hired in one country, employed on a vessel flagged to another, working in the waters of a third, and you get a jurisdictional tangle that almost nobody is positioned to untangle in the moment a problem occurs.

The report's authors organise this complexity into a three-dimensional framework I found genuinely useful: the jurisdiction where fishing happens (from internal waters out to the high seas), the legal status of the fisher (national versus non-national), and the scale of the fleet (small-scale, medium-scale, or large-scale industrial). It sounds academic, but it's actually a practical diagnostic tool. It lets you ask, for any given labour problem: whose law applies here, and does that law actually reach this category of worker?

The Convention at the Centre — and Its Limits

Much of the international legal architecture the report describes revolves around ILO Convention No. 188, the Work in Fishing Convention, which sets minimum standards for safety, medical care, rest hours, and wages on board fishing vessels. It's a solid instrument. But as the report is honest enough to admit, ratification remains thin , only 24 states as of writing, and none of the major distant water fishing nations beyond Spain have signed on. That's a gap I've raised in my own writing too, from the theory and as a ILO-trained fisheries labour inspector.

What I appreciated is that the report doesn't just lament this gap; it goes looking for evidence that the underlying standards are spreading anyway, through domestic law, regional agreements, and market pressure, even where formal ratification hasn't happened. That's the subject I'll pick up in Part 2, because the most encouraging parts of this report, for me, aren't about the treaty itself. They're about what states, regional fisheries bodies, and even private industry are doing around it, often without waiting for Geneva to catch up.

For now, the takeaway from the first half of this report is simple but important: decent work in fisheries is not a side issue to sustainable fisheries management; it is part of it. Anyone still treating labour conditions as separate from fisheries management and IUU is, frankly, a decade behind where this field has already moved.

Part 2 continues with a look at how countries and regional fisheries bodies are actually putting these principles into practice — with mixed, but genuinely instructive, results.

What Happens to the Fish That Swim Away

A new study out of New Zealand's snapper fishery has put a number on something recreational fishers rarely think about once a fish disappears back under the boat: how many of those released fish actually survive.

Source: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/gear-summer-snapper-season-return-em-right

The paper, published this month in Fisheries Management and Ecology by Jade Maggs and colleagues from Earth Sciences New Zealand and Blue Water Marine Research (whom I worked with in 2004 on a similar area), tackles the SNA 1 stock (the snapper fishery on the upper east coast of the North Island, and by some measure, the largest recreational fishery in the country).

Private boats alone harvested more than 1.3 million snapper in the 2022–23 season, with another 237,000 taken by charter operators. But harvest is only half the catch. Because of a 30 cm minimum legal size and increasingly restrictive bag limits, well over half of everything hooked in this fishery goes back over the side, 62% in the private sector, 69% on charters.

The question the authors set out to answer is deceptively simple: of all those released fish, how many die?

How they did it

Rather than relying on lab trials alone, the team combined three things. First, they sent interviewers to eleven boat ramps and observers aboard charter vessels for a full year (January 2024–January 2025), recording fork length, capture depth, hook location (lip, foul, or gut), and fate (kept or released) for nearly 24,000 snappers. Second, they used mortality probabilities from an earlier controlled field experiment by Maggs and colleagues, which had already shown that depth of capture and where the hook lodges are the two strongest predictors of whether a released fish lives or dies. Third, they scaled all of this up using national harvest survey data, so the sampled proportions could be converted into fishery-wide tonnes and numbers.

The result: an estimated 1,110 tonnes (2.6 million fish) were released across the SNA 1 fishery over the year. Of those, roughly 248 tonnes (about 580,000 fish) were expected to die from the stress and injury of capture and release, even though they swam away. That is 200 t in the private boat fishery and 48 t in the charter sector, and it lines up almost exactly with the 20% mortality rate found in the earlier experimental work, which is a nice bit of internal consistency for the model.

Put another way: 22% of the biomass of snapper released in this fishery is expected to die anyway. Nearly a quarter of every fish anglers believe they are returning to the water unharmed don't make it.

Most of the mortality risk can be traced back to two things. Deep-hooked and foul-hooked fish die at much higher rates than lip-hooked fish, and fish caught from deeper water, where barotrauma and rapid decompression come into play, fare worse than those taken in the shallows. The good news is that most snapper in this fishery are lip-hooked (around 89–95%, depending on sector), which keeps the overall mortality rate from being far worse.

The less good news is that the current stock assessment's allowance for "other sources of mortality" across all three fishing sectors is only 450 t a year, and recreational post-release deaths alone account for more than half of that, without counting under-reporting, ghost fishing, or illegal take.

Why this matters beyond the numbers

I wrote a piece back in May about the New Zealand Fisheries Amendment Bill debate, and one of the threads I pulled on was the discard and minimum legal size provisions and how the entire argument, on both sides, tends to collapse into slogans like "legalising discards" without engaging with what discarding already looks like in practice or why it happens.

The core point I was making then is that incentives, not intentions, drive outcomes. Under the current rules, undersized fish, commercial or recreational, can be released without consequence, even in situations where we've known since the mid-2000s that survival is often poor.

There's no cost attached to catching a fish you can't legally keep, so there's little built-in incentive to avoid catching it in the first place. The Bill's proposal to require landing and counting undersized fish against quota in low-survival commercial fisheries was, I argued, at least a coherent attempt to fix that incentive gap, even if it opens up other legitimate concerns about markets for small fish.

This new snapper study is exactly the kind of evidence that the debate needed and largely didn't have. It's easy to argue about minimum legal sizes in the abstract. It's harder to argue with 580,000 dead fish a year, quantified with published mortality probabilities and a proper bootstrap-derived confidence interval, sitting inside a species-specific allowance that's clearly too small for the job.

And it cuts both ways politically, which is what makes it useful rather than just another talking point. It's not an argument for scrapping the minimum legal size — the authors are explicit that removing or lowering it wouldn't necessarily reduce the number of releases since around 15% of released snapper were already above the legal size and released voluntarily or to stay within bag limits. But it is a strong argument that regulatory settings built around size limits and release-and-hope have a real, quantifiable biological cost that current management allowances don't reflect.

The paper's authors put it plainly: the current 450 t allowance for "other mortality" across all sectors is very likely insufficient once you actually measure what's happening at sea rather than assume it away.

The encouraging part of the story is that SNA 1 is, right now, a stock in good shape, rebuilt substantially since the 1990s low. Better hook and gear choices; awareness of depth-related mortality; and, as I said in May, clearer, less politically charged rules agreed upon before the pressure arrives, rather than fought over in the middle of a crisis.

Fish that swim away aren't necessarily fish that survive. If we're going to build fisheries policy, recreational or commercial, around the assumption that release equals conservation, we need studies like this one to keep testing whether that assumption actually holds.

The Tahiti dFAD Workshop: From Diagnosis to a First Real Ledger

Back in February, I was in Tahiti for the International Workshop on Mitigation of dFAD Loss and Abandonment in the Pacific, organised by SPC with the Direction des Ressources Marines of French Polynesia, ISSF, The Nature Conservancy and IATTC. I wrote about the experience at the time, first describing it as a waste crisis in the WCPO, and then, once I'd had time to sit with the FAO/IMO framing, arguing that dFADs are effectively ALDFG — abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear — whatever the legal semantics say.

The official workshop report has now been published, and it's worth going back to it, because it puts numbers and structure around what was, at the time, mostly a feeling of watching a slow-motion train crash.

The scale of the meeting itself tells you something: 110 participants from 25 countries and territories, 35 presentations, three group exercises, spread across three themes — building shared definitions, exchanging stranded data, and identifying what a sustainable dFAD fishery would actually look like. This was the second such gathering, following the first international workshop on FAD recovery in Galapagos in 2024, and the difference in maturity between the two is, I think, the real story.

The numbers that frame the problem
Between 46,000 and 65,000 dFADs are deployed annually across the Pacific. More than 70% are never re-observed in the Eastern Pacific. An estimated 23.4% of EPO-deployed dFADs cross or drift into the WCPFC Convention Area. In the WCPO, at least 11.3% end up stranded, and 82% have an unknown ultimate fate.

That last figure is the one that matters most: we are managing a fishery input at an industrial scale while being unable to say, for the overwhelming majority of units, what happened to them. You can't govern what you can't see.

Finally, some shared language

A large part of the workshop went into something deceptively basic: agreeing on what "lost," "abandoned," "discarded", and "stranded" actually mean for a dFAD. Different stakeholder groups (fishers, governments, NGOs, scientists, regional bodies) proposed and voted on definitions, and the spread of answers was itself revealing.

Fishers, for instance, pushed hard on the idea that a dFAD drifting into a zone they're not licensed to fish or an MPA, is not "abandoned" in any meaningful sense, even though it is abandoned in law. That's exactly the tension I flagged in the ALDFG post: intentionality is a legal question, but ecologically irrelevant.

The workshop didn't resolve that tension so much as map it, producing a full lifecycle table that traces a dFAD from deployment through to its three real endpoints — retrieved, stranded, or sunk — with "lost," "abandoned," "discarded" and "reused" as the intermediate, contestable states in between.

The money is starting to move

This is where the report earns its keep. At the first Galapagos workshop in 2024, the funding discussion apparently went nowhere, and no concrete model emerged.

In Tahiti, that changed. Danielle Ferraro and Erin O'Reilly from UC Santa Barbara's Environmental Markets Lab presented an actual deposit-refund model: a deposit paid by the fishing company on deployment, a refund paid to whoever retrieves the dFAD, regardless of whether that's the original owner.

SPC's own feasibility study laid out five mitigation options side by side, deposit-refund among them, alongside dedicated cleaning vessels, better deployment siting, and shore-based "FAD watch" retrieval. None of these is mutually exclusive, which is a useful correction to my own instinct to look for one silver-bullet mechanism.

Interestingly, my friend Craig Heberer and I submitted a proposal a month ago to a PNA consultancy opportunity to help with initiating a FAD Buoy Recovery Programme. Let's see how it goes.

More concretely still, a sustainable funding initiative to recover dFADs before they strand was presented by an industry-backed body — the Ocean dFAD Recovery Foundation, drawing on several purse-seine associations (ATA, ATUNEC, OPAGAC) — and was positively received by a significant segment of the EPO fleet, with some WCPO uptake. And the three dominant buoy manufacturers, Marine Instruments, Zunibal and Satlink, the same trio whose competitive pricing I've argued turned dFADs into disposable, buy-forget-abandon commodities, signed a first-of-its-kind joint declaration of intent to align on recovery and circularity practices. Whether that translates into anything more than a press-friendly commitment remains to be seen, but it's a different starting position than a year ago.

What's actually happening on the water

The report is refreshingly concrete about existing programmes: SPC's regional stranding database now holds over 4,000 entries (with records going back to 2006); the Solomon Islands programme has logged more than 600 strandings across four dedicated trips; Tuvalu pays fishers for buoys brought in; Hawaii runs a bounty system for derelict gear, including FADs; French Polynesia has collected over 1,500 stranding reports through community networks. A 250kg-capacity portable crane developed by AZTI was floated as a practical fix for the very unglamorous problem of small vessels being unable to physically lift a stranded dFAD off a reef.

Workshop groups also produced a list of 51 candidate performance indicators for recovery programmes — cost per retrieval, weight of material recovered, response time, proportion of fleet participating, and so on… and four draft project proposals, including a genuinely interesting one to test whether sunk dFADs actually biodegrade at 200–6,000m depth, versus simply assuming they do.

Where this leaves things

None of this closes the legal gaps Justin Rose's review for SPC surfaced — when a dFAD counts as "fishing," who owns it once it drifts, whether MARPOL, Basel, BBNJ or UNCLOS actually bite on an artificial structure adrift in someone else's EEZ. MSC's revised standards, phasing in from 2027 for new fisheries and 2030 for recertification, will force some of this into certification audits regardless of how the legal questions get resolved.

But the shift in tone between the two workshops is real: from a room agreeing there's a problem, to a room with an actual bond mechanism on the table, an industry foundation with money behind it, and buoy manufacturers signing their names to something. It's still, as I said in February, a bill that the Pacific's coastal communities have been paying on our behalf. This report is the first sign that the industry is starting to reach for its wallet.

Why the "Pacific model" of fisheries cooperation keeps working

A while back, I wrote here about being part of the CAPFISH summer academy in Suva, and before that, about the very first CAPFISH workshop back in 2022. One of the nice things about staying involved in something over a few years is that occasionally it turns into a paper, just published in the WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs, that I was invited to co-author: "Regional patterns in coordination and cooperation in the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing", led by Kathleen Auld and Francis Neat at the World Maritime University.

Using Starboard.nz as part of the arsenal

The idea is simple. IUU fishing is too big and too expensive for most developing coastal states and Small Island Developing States (or Big Ocean Sovereignty States - BOSS as my friend Bubba Cook likes it better) to tackle on their own. Regional cooperation is about pooling assets, running joint patrols, sharing data, and establishing common rules.

So the paper examines four regions facing very different situations — West Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Pacific Islands — and asks what has actually worked and what hasn't.

My contribution was the Pacific case study, and I want to use this post to explain why, out of the four, the Pacific comes out looking like the most successful example. Not because Pacific people are cleverer than anyone else, but because of how they chose to organise.

Large ocean states, not small islands

The first thing to get right is the framing. The Pacific Island Countries are usually filed under "SIDS", but that label misses the point. In reality, they are large ocean nations, custodians of an enormous combined EEZ, and home to one of the biggest tuna fisheries on the planet.

Fisheries are not a side issue there; in many of these countries, the majority of government revenue comes from fishing, and communities depend on it for jobs, food and livelihoods. That vastness is exactly the problem; no single country can police that much water by itself, and it is also exactly why cooperation was never optional. Necessity did the organising.

A regionally agreed policy that becomes national law

Most of what makes the Pacific work runs through the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA). The centrepiece is the Harmonised Minimum Terms and Conditions for Foreign Fishing Vessel Access (the MTCs), first developed in 1983 and updated ever since. This is the clever bit that I think other regions can learn from. The MTCs are, legally speaking, just a regionally agreed policy — soft law. But they are made hard by being written into each member's national legislation, so that every distant-water vessel wanting to fish in the region has to meet the same baseline, no matter whose waters it is in.

On top of that framework, the region has bolted on the tools that actually catch things. Observers, government-nominated people placed on board, who started out collecting scientific data and now also handle compliance; purse seiners in Pacific waters carry one at all times. A satellite-based VMS since 1999, one of the first in the world, tied to the FFA regional register so that every licensed vessel reports its position port to port, not just inside the EEZ. Standardised electronic reporting of catch and vessel movements. A ban on transhipment at sea in coastal waters has been in place since 2005. And, since 2020, minimum labour standards based on the ILO Work in Fishing Convention (C188) have been built straight into the licensing conditions; don't comply with your crew's minimum rights, and you lose your good standing on the register and your fishing rights.

Sharing the picture and sharing the assets

Behind all of this sits what I think is the real jewel: the regional surveillance picture, hosted at the Regional Fisheries Surveillance Centre in FFA HQ. It pulls together, in real time, the positions of vessels reporting to FFA, the WCPFC, and AIS, layered over vessel registers, licence lists, observer reports, and boarding records. From that, you can build a compliance index for each vessel and steer patrol boats towards the ones worth inspecting.

The legal backbone for all this data sharing is the Niue Treaty of 1992. And crucially, countries share not just information but hardware; twelve PICs run a handful of patrol boats between them and top up with aerial surveillance from the Quadrilateral Defence group (Australia, New Zealand, France and the USA). Enforcement stays a national responsibility, always, but nobody is doing it alone.

The clearest sign it works is the quantification of IUU in the tuna fishery. The estimates are low, and they fell between the 2016 and 2020 surveys. The dominant threat was never dramatic pirate fishing; it was unreported catch by licensed vessels, and better coordination and monitoring brought it down. There is also a nice detail I keep pointing to: the MTCs fold in port-state measures aligned with the PSMA, even though very few PICs have actually signed the PSMA. You get the substance of a convention without waiting for everyone to ratify it, and you can tailor it to local realities.

Honest about the gaps

I don't want this to read like a victory lap, because it isn't one. Longline observer coverage sits at a 7.5% target and often falls short because the trips are long and conditions on board are grim. Observers on foreign fleets face threats and abuse, and some have gone missing at sea. Any programme that puts people in that position owes them protection. The transhipment ban applies to purse seiners, but longliners can simply shift to the high seas. And the honest conclusion of the whole paper is one worth repeating: regional cooperation cannot compensate for a lack of resources. It multiplies what you have; it doesn't create it from nothing. External partners and, above all, a strong regional body remain essential.

That, to me, is the "Pacific model" in one line: a credible regional body, minimum standards everyone writes into their own law, shared data and shared assets, and the humility to know where the holes still are. It is not magic, and it is not free, but it travels well, and I think West Africa, Latin America, and East Asia can each take a piece of it home.

The full paper is open access in the WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs. As always, the views here are my personal ones.

The 2026 US NOAA Report to Congress on IUU Fishing, Forced Labour, Bycatch and Shark Catch

I wrote back in 2023 about NOAA Fisheries' biennial Report to Congress, the one mandated under the High Seas Driftnet Fishing Moratorium Protection Act (as amended by Magnuson-Stevens). NOAA has just released the 2026 edition, titled Improving International Fisheries Management, and as usual, it is worth a read even while keeping in mind the geopolitical lens through which any single country produces this kind of "who's naughty" list.

The mechanics haven't changed: NMFS identifies nations or entities for IUU fishing, forced labour, shark catch without a comparable conservation programme, or bycatch of protected living marine resources (PLMRs). Identification triggers a two-year consultation period, after which NMFS issues either a positive or a negative certification. A negative certification means denial of U.S. port access for the relevant vessels, and potentially import restrictions on the fish they land.

New identifications this cycle

For IUU fishing: Costa Rica, Grenada, Mexico, Morocco, the PRC, and the Russian Federation. For forced labour: Burma and the PRC — the first time Burma appears in this report, for conditions on the raft and mid-shore fisheries of the Ayeyarwady Delta, where roughly 40,000 people work and the majority are estimated to be in forced labour. For shark catch: Ghana, Japan, Mexico, Namibia, the PRC, Taiwan, and Vanuatu — all for lacking binding "fins naturally attached" requirements. And, notably, PLMR bycatch identifications now extend into the Pacific for the first time, catching Indonesia and Papua New Guinea for insufficient sea turtle bycatch monitoring in their pelagic longline fleets, a shift from the Atlantic-heavy focus of previous reports.

Certifications

Positive certifications went to Angola, The Gambia, Taiwan, and Vanuatu (on their 2023 IUU identifications), and to Tunisia (already certified positive back in May 2025, for adopting whole-finfish-bait requirements comparable to U.S. sea turtle bycatch mitigation). Negative certifications went to Grenada, Mexico, and the PRC for IUU fishing, and — this is the new bit — to the PRC and Vanuatu specifically for shark catch.

I have to flag Vanuatu again, since concerns were raised about them back in 2023. They get a positive certification for the IUU/CCAMLR/IATTC issues that triggered their original identification — genuine progress, with resolved transshipment notification gaps and resumed observer reporting. But they now carry a negative certification for sharks because, despite claiming that finning is prohibited, NMFS found no binding legislation to that effect, and Vanuatu's own National Plan of Action for Seabirds, Sharks and Turtles plainly states that "nothing in the Vanuatu national laws prevents" finning. That is a remarkably candid admission to have sitting in a national policy document.

Vanuatu's Fisheries Act provides the framework for implementing RFMO measures, but the gazette that would make them binding still hasn't been published. This is exactly the gap between having decent people trying their best in a fisheries authority and having a legal and political system that backs them up with the instruments they need — which is what I flagged three years ago.

Mexico's lanchas, again

This is the fifth cycle in a row Mexico has been identified for the same issue: small-scale vessels (lanchas) illegally fishing red snapper in the U.S. EEZ. The numbers this time are stark — 185 vessels interdicted by the US Coast Guard across 2022–2024, 175 case packages handed to Mexican authorities, and 92% of individuals interdicted in 2024 alone had been caught before, some more than 40 times. Mexico has taken some steps — a Tamaulipas working group, a proposed prevention zone — but recidivism has actually increased. Port denials for Mexican Gulf vessels, in place since February 2022, remain in effect.

The PRC, unsurprisingly, is everywhere

The PRC picks up identifications or negative certifications across nearly every category: IUU fishing (flag state control failures over distant-water vessels fishing in others' EEZs — Sierra Leone, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia, Vanuatu all cited), forced labour (squid jiggers and distant-water crew), and sharks (still no finning ban outside RFMO jurisdiction, and PRC belongs to three RFMOs — SPRFMO, CCAMLR, SIOFA — that lack one).

NMFS also flags, in the "priority issues" chapter, that PRC access agreements are more opaque than the EU's, which publishes its agreements and authorised vessel lists in full. This opacity around access agreements — who gets to fish where, under what MCS obligations — is a structural issue I keep coming back to in my own work, and it is good to see it get its own chapter here rather than being buried as a footnote to specific country cases.

Transhipment gets some real movement

Worth noting for those of us who follow this closely: SPRFMO adopted 100% observer coverage for transhipment in 2024 (led by the U.S.), NPFC stood up a regional transhipment observer programme in 2025, and ICCAT adopted Rec. 24-15 restricting non-member carrier vessels and banning dual carrier/fishing authorisation.

Meanwhile, WCPFC's 2009 transhipment measure remains stubbornly un-updated… a familiar story for those of us in the Pacific.

The report also documents a case of 22 PRC-flagged vessels transshipping 59 times with the Wan Tong, a vessel already on NPFC's IUU list under a different name, which the PRC nonetheless kept on its approved carrier list on the basis of a change of ownership and flag. NPFC found the PRC non-compliant as a result — a useful, concrete illustration of exactly how transhipment control gets gamed.

The full report is worth reading directly for the RFMO-by-RFMO detail in the later chapters, particularly if you work across CCAMLR, IATTC, ICCAT, or the Pacific bodies.

As always, the identifications and certifications reflect U.S. interests (hence China is the constant villain) and U.S. legal comparability standards, not a neutral global assessment — but as a structured, sourced, and reasonably transparent process, it remains one of the better public trackers of state-level IUU and bycatch performance available.

The views expressed here are my personal ones and don't reflect the position of any of my contractors.

Deep-sea mining's "third age" and the breaking of a bargain

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the science of deep-sea mining and the Glover et al. review that rejected the easy story in either direction. This post is about the other half of the problem, the half the science can't touch: the governance.

source: https://isa.org.jm/maps/clarion-clipperton-fracture-zone/

And for that I've been reading a very different kind of document — an edited version of a lecture Michael Lodge gave at the US Naval War College in March, published in International Law Studies (108 INT'L L. STUD. 256 (2026)).

Michael Lodge is not a neutral observer. He served as Secretary-General of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) from 2017 to 2024 and was part of its machinery for 26 years. He now advises governments and industry. So you read him, knowing where he sits. But that's exactly why the piece is worth engaging with — it's an insider describing, with unusual bluntness, how the institution he led has hit what he calls an existential crisis.

I should say upfront that I actually know and really appreciate Michael. We shared an expert consultation on flag-state performance in Washington some years back, and he was a reference for my application to the Rhodes Academy of Ocean Law and Policy. I've always appreciated his frankness and, more than that, his willingness to work things from the inside rather than lob criticism from the sidelines, which is precisely what makes this lecture worth reading. He's not a man who walks away from a broken thing; he stays and tells you exactly how it broke.

When I did the ISA's Deep Dive 3 training back in 2024, the governance architecture of the Area was one of the modules. Reading Lodge, I kept thinking: the infrastructure I studied is the same, but the pressure in it has changed completely.

Three ages, and one broken promise

Mr Lodge frames the whole history as three "ages." The first ran from the late 1960s to UNCLOS in 1982 — a period of real commercial interest, ten international consortia, and actual recovery tests in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. That age died when Part XI of UNCLOS turned out, in industry's reading, to be deliberately designed to make private mining unviable: mandatory technology transfer, production ceilings to protect land-based producers, and a review conference that could rewrite contracts retroactively. The US voted against the Convention in 1982. Reagan set out conditions it never met.

The second age began with UNCLOS entering into force in 1994, after an Implementation Agreement that stripped out the most punitive bits of Part XI. This is the age I was trained in. Exploration contracts grew from six in 2001 to thirty-one by 2024. Twenty-two sponsoring states. More than $2 billion invested. Lodge says that five years ago he'd have called the regime an unqualified success — and I believe him, because that's roughly the story Deep Dive 3 tells.

Then comes the part that genuinely changed how I think about this. The 1994 deal rested on a "fundamental bargain": the ISA would not stand in the way of commercial mining once a contractor was ready. The safety valve was the so-called two-year rule—any contractor ready to apply could ask the Council to finalise exploitation regulations within two years, and if it didn't, the Council still had to consider the application under whatever rules existed.

Nauru invoked it in 2021. The two years expired in July 2023. The Council did not adopt regulations and then questioned whether Nauru had the right to trigger the rule at all.

Mr Lodge's outrage here is the sharpest passage in the lecture, and I find it hard to dismiss. Many of the same industrialised states that insisted on the two-year rule in the 1990s to protect their own pioneer investors were foremost in opposing a developing state's attempt to apply it.

 Some have held exploration claims for over thirty years with, as he puts it, no serious intent to ever produce. France has been at it since 1987 — thirty-nine years of exploration and counting. Germany holds its contract while formally declining to sponsor any mining "until further notice."  

The players who wrote the rules now won't play by them when it suits them, and they're doing so to the detriment of a Pacific island state. As someone whose working life is largely in the Pacific, that framing lands.

It is quite obvious from the reading that Mr Lodge does not think highly of the environmental opposition, as he sees it as almost entirely in bad faith — NGOs and civil society coalitions "designed to prevent any viable exploitation regime from materialising," with funders quietly listed to imply hidden agendas.

I pretty much left most of social media after being targeted by Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd because of the death threats I got for pointing out the scientific inconsistencies and the veiled racism in the Seaspiracy movie. So I get that he had very personal attacks on a scale that I can’t imagine. As with fisheries, I share his contempt for groups that offer only opposition and have no willingness to find compromises and solutions to real needs (mineral or seafood).

Yet having just read Glover et all,  the environmental caution needs to be considered, and in my opinion, if you look at the comparative surface of the Areas of Especial Environmental Interest in the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone, environmental concerns are not being ignored.

The reality is that the science genuinely says "we don't yet fully know" about all the potential impacts of the nodule fields, and even less about vents and seamounts. A regulator dragging its feet is not proof that the concerns are fake. Lodge is describing institutional failure honestly, and the environmental NGOs are not as innocent as they pretend to be… Both things can coexist.

That said, what I think is his central strategic point survives the disagreement, and it's the bit I keep thinking about.

 The core argument is this: a dysfunctional ISA is not a stalemate that hurts everyone equally. It suits some players enormously.

China holds ISA exploration contracts across all three mineral categories — nodules, sulphides, crusts. It sits on the Council and the Legal and Technical Commission, and since 2023, it's been the largest financial contributor. Its state contractors face no investor pressure to reach production. So delay costs them nothing and costs Western private operators, who need a bankable timeline before a board will commit capital—everything.

From Beijing's vantage point, Lodge argues, a paralysed ISA is "not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be managed."

Meanwhile, the US, having never ratified UNCLOS, has simply reactivated its 1980 domestic law (DSHMRA) via Trump's Executive Order 14285, and NOAA now lets companies apply for exploration and recovery permits in one go. I wrote about this here.

The Metals Company has already filed overground that overlaps existing ISA contracts. We now have parallel legal architectures for the same seabed, the multilateral ISA regime and a US national one, and no agreed mechanism for what happens when they collide.

Mr Lodge sees two futures. In the first, ISA members get their act together and fast-track a commercially realistic Mining Code; he thinks this is highly unlikely. In the second, his bet, the ISA stays frozen or worsens; the US builds a plurilateral "reciprocating states" framework with allies (an updated version of the 1980s arrangement); and parallel licensing becomes the working reality. He even floats, carefully, that they will be excising Part XI from UNCLOS altogether.

What I take from it

I read this the way I read Glover… as a model for how to think, not to be handed a position. The lecture is a lawyer-strategist's masterclass, and its structural insight is hard to unsee: paralysis has winners.

An institution that can't decide isn't holding a neutral line while the grown-ups work things out; it's quietly allocating advantage to whoever benefits from the clock running.

For the Pacific especially, that matters. The states with the most at stake, Nauru, the Cook Islands, and others weighing their continental shelves, are the ones being pulled between coalitions, national frameworks, and a multilateral body that promised them a seat and then couldn't function. The "common heritage of mankind" was supposed to be their guarantee. Right now, it reads more like an unresolved argument about what those four words even mean. 

Whether mining should proceed is a question science says we're not yet fully equipped to answer. But who gets to decide, and under whose rules… that contest is already underway, and as Mr Lodge says, it'll be settled in about five years. That's a strategic problem far more than a legal one, and the window to shape it is narrow.

In any case… whatever your position on deep-sea mining is… Michael Lodge’s paper is crucial reading if you really want to understand the complexity of the issue.

While the number of HS transhipment are less... nothing really changes

I have written about high-seas transhipment in the WCPFC so many times now that I've lost count, and every year I tell myself the same thing: let’s keep the light on it… Things may not change, but at least there are no hidden

The latest Annual Report on Transhipment Reporting (WCPFC-TCC22-2026-RP03), pulled together by the WCPFC Secretariat for TCC22, gives me both a bit of hope and the same old frustration. So let me walk through it, because the story it tells is one I've been telling for years, just with fresher numbers.

The transhipment events (left) and species transhipped (right) in 2025 within the WCPFC Convention area.

First, the good news: reported high-seas transhipment activity has continued to decline. In 2025, there were 888 events, roughly 60% of the 2019 peak of nearly 1,470. That's a real drop, but it just follows a general drop in LL HS effort, and many LLs are working in the EEZ of some countries that do not allow them to TS in the HS

But also, the WCPFC secretariat has done a lot of quiet, unglamorous work that actually matters: quarterly reconciliation with CCMs instead of relying on the annual crunch, wider use of the TSER e-reporting system, and providing coastal CCMs with routine electronic access to declarations for fish reported as caught in their own waters. That last point is not trivial.

For years, the coastal states in whose EEZs this fish is caught had no visibility of what happened to it once it left for the high seas. Now they do, quarterly. Credit where it's due.

But here's where the frustration comes back in. Look past the declining event count, and the picture is depressingly familiar. In 2025, 56% of the vessels on the Record of Fishing Vessels were authorised to tranship on the high seas; that's over 1,750 vessels holding an authorisation for something that is supposed to be the exception, not the rule.

And of those, only about 28% actually used it. In other words, the authorisation is being handed out far more broadly than the activity justifies, which suggests the "impracticability" test meant to gate this whole thing is not being applied with anything approaching rigour. It's a box to tick, not a hurdle to clear.

And who is doing the transshipping?

The same names as always. The offloading side is dominated by China and Chinese Taipei, with Korea and Vanuatu behind them. The carriers fly to Panama, Korea, Chinese Taipei and China. This is the core group of distant-water fishing nations I've written about repeatedly, and the pattern from the Starboard/MIMRA network analysis holds: vessels mostly tranship within their own flag, carriers cluster by flag, and a small number of carriers move an outsized share of the fish. Nothing structural has shifted.

The volumes remain concentrated in albacore, bigeye and yellowfin — the report estimates that in 2025 something like 25% of the longline albacore catch, 33% of the bigeye, and 37% of the yellowfin from the Convention Area was transshipped on the high seas.

That is not a marginal activity happening at the edges. That is a very large chunk of the region's most valuable catch changing hands out of independent sight.

Which brings me to the part that worries everyone, and it's the part that hasn't improved at all: verification.

The whole point of observer coverage on transhipments is to ensure that an independent observer can confirm what the vessels are self-declaring. And the report is refreshingly blunt about how badly that's going.

Table 7 lays it out: carrier transhipment declarations against observer reports held by SPC, month by month, for 2024 and 2025. The "per cent observed" column consists of single digits and zeros. Whole months in 2025 with zero observer reports against 50, 80, 100+ declared events.

The WCPFC Secretariat is careful to say some reports haven't been entered yet, and that's fair. But even allowing for lag, a significant number of these transhipments simply have no independent observer record available to the Commission. So we are verifying nothing. We are taking the word of the vessels who are doing the activity that it is fine.

And on top of that, the report notes uncomfortable situations in which the same observer covers both the offloading and receiving vessels, or leans heavily on the vessel's own tally of what was moved. That's not independent observation. It's paperwork.

This is exactly why I keep arguing for an independent high-seas transhipment regional observer programme, the way IOTC, ICCAT and IATTC run theirs. Every other tuna RFMO manages some version of independent oversight. We don't.

There's promising work in here too: the Secretariat's proximity-alert tool, the location-discrepancy tool flagging carriers reporting events tens of kilometres, or even 193 km, from their nearest VMS position, and a third tool coming to detect discrepancies between the notifications and declarations for a single event.

These are good, and they're the kind of analytical muscle the region has needed for years. But, and this is the recurring theme, tools flag problems; they don't fix them. Fixing them requires the Commission members to actually make a decision. And that's where we keep failing.

Remember, the Transhipment Intersessional Working Group was disestablished in 2024 because CCMs couldn't agree on the core stuff. The impracticability guidance, the very thing that would give teeth to paragraph 37, is still not done.

High-seas transhipment continues, as the report politely puts it, "based on historical practices," with flag CCMs "noting their consideration of" costs. That is diplomatic language for: the DWFNs claim it's too expensive to come to port, no one makes them prove it, and it carries on.

So here's my message, and it's the same as it's always been…. Take the pressure off, and the curve straightens right back out, because the main DWFNs doing this transshipping have shown no genuine interest in doing the right thing.

They'll report a little better, tranship a little less, hold onto their broad authorisations, and wait for everyone to lose interest.

We can't afford to lose interest. We need to close the impracticability loophole, mandate real observer coverage, and stop pretending self-declaration is verification. Otherwise, we'll be back here next year, admiring another small drop in the numbers, and changing nothing.

The views expressed here are my personal ones.

A New Roadmap for the Pacific's Coastal Fisheries

I was moved beyond words by having one of my photographs on the cover of what may be this region's most important publication on the future of coastal communities — and another in its key opening chapter. This region has been home for more than half my life. I would not be who I am without my Pacific colleagues and friends.

While I don’t really work on coastal fisheries, I wanted to write about this document beyond the fact that my camera often happened to be with coastal fishers.

The Pacific Climate Change Strategy for Coastal Fisheries and Aquaculture (2026–2036), released by the Pacific Community (SPC) out of Noumea, is the product of two years of Member-led negotiation — from a mandate at the Heads of Fisheries meeting in 2024, through ministerial endorsement in Niue in 2025, to final clearance in Noumea this April. It is dense, technical, and, in places, quietly devastating. It is also, I think, the kind of document this region has needed for a long time.

Why coastal fisheries, and why now

It's easy for coastal fisheries to get lost in conversations about the Pacific and climate change, overshadowed by the offshore tuna industry's economic weight or by the more visceral imagery of sinking atolls. But coastal fisheries are the fabric of daily life here. They account for an estimated 57% of fisheries-related GDP across the region, and coastal marine resources supply roughly half of all animal protein Pacific Islanders eat. In Palau, for example, aquatic food consumption reaches up to 125 kg per person per year, among the highest rates anywhere on Earth. These fisheries aren't just an economic sector. They're food security, they're women's livelihoods, they're the social safety net that kept communities fed when COVID-19 cut off imported supplies, and they're inseparable from custom, ceremony, and identity.

And they're under serious threat. Coral bleaching, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, and shifting species distributions are already degrading the reefs, mangroves, and seagrass meadows these fisheries depend on. The modelling in the Strategy is stark: coastal fisheries catches across the Pacific are projected to fall by 2050, with losses reaching as high as 65% of annual catch in the hardest-hit locations under high-emissions scenarios, and some countries facing protein deficits of up to 29 kg per person per year.

Yet despite all this exposure, the sector receives less than 1% of global climate adaptation finance, and the Pacific as a whole has accessed only 0.22% of global climate funds. Coastal fisheries barely feature in most national climate plans. This Strategy exists to close that gap, between how much this sector matters and how little it has been resourced to adapt.

Six objectives, twenty-two actions

Rather than treating climate change as a single problem, the Strategy organises its response around six connected strategic objectives: strengthening adaptation and resilience; advancing mitigation and blue carbon protection; recognising and responding to loss and damage; ensuring fishing communities are informed and heard; mobilising climate finance; and embedding coastal fisheries in Pacific and global climate policy.

Underlying these are 22 specific actions, ranging from scaling up community-based fisheries management (still, the document argues, the single most effective governance tool the region has) to piloting climate risk insurance for small-scale fishers, to helping countries build the technical capacity to write competitive proposals for funds such as the Green Climate Fund or the newly established Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.

What struck me most, reading it, was the loss and damage section. The Strategy is blunt about this: for Pacific fishing communities, loss and damage are not a future risk to be modelled. As it puts it, it “is a present reality.” That section pushes for something more than economic accounting; it calls for national capacity to document slow, cumulative losses that don't show up neatly in a spreadsheet: the disappearance of species a family has fished for generations, the erosion of access to traditional grounds, the loss of species central to ceremony. Documentation methods, the Strategy insists, should be decided nationally and can be qualitative, narrative, or culturally grounded… not forced into a template that was never built for this region.

I also appreciated that this isn't a document that treats gender equity as an afterthought. Women make up roughly half of everyone engaged in subsistence fishing in the Pacific and account for 56% of small-scale catch by volume, yet they're consistently the least visible in the data and the governance structures that decide who gets heard and who gets resourced. The Strategy builds gender, disability, and social inclusion into a mandatory accountability standard running through every single objective and action, not a side box to tick.

A regional framework, not a regional mandate

One thing the Strategy is careful about is not overreaching. It explicitly describes itself as “a regional framework, not a regional prescription”— each Pacific Island country and territory implements it through its own national fisheries plans, on its own political timeline, adapted to its own capacity and vulnerability. An accompanying tiering framework sorts the 22 actions by sequence: what has to happen first (strengthening data systems, scaling community-based management, embedding fisheries in disaster planning), what accelerates once those foundations exist, and what requires longer, sustained investment, like innovative finance mechanisms and insurance products.

Why this matters to me

I've spent more than half my life in this region, mostly working on compliance mentoring and research on boats and docks, and sometimes photographing the people for whom fisheries is not a hobby, but their livelihood, mostly fellow commercial fishermen, but sometimes, a couple helping each other after a fishing day in Kiritimati, or the young men in Noro coming to check me out while superfinishing,.

Seeing those pictures in the cover and opening chapter of the Strategy is something I still haven't fully processed. This document won't fix everything (no strategy could), but it names, clearly and with real evidence behind it, what people here have known for a long time: that these waters, and the people who depend on them, deserve far more attention and far more finance than they've been given. I hope it gets both.

The full Strategy is available through the Pacific Community (SPC). Many thanks to Marie Lecomte for choosing the pictures and to SPC for the acknowledgement.

Help me understand this “new” longline manoeuvring pattern

I’m trying to better understand this emerging fishing pattern — and I'd love to hear from people who've actually seen it in action.

Something interesting is showing up in vessel-tracking data, and I think the people best placed to explain it are those out on the water or those who manage them.

More and more, I’ve been observing in the WCPO longline fleet a change in the traditional manoeuvring pattern from parallel straight lines to an almost rectangular overlapping pattern  

And I have been asked to have a look at this and the potential it may have on the way we monitor LL fisheries and its impacts on CPUE

One of the explanations I’ve been asked to take a closer look at is what's being called "double setting" — a more complex setting pattern that some longline vessels appear to be using within a single fishing operation.

From what we've been able to piece together and out of one the theories, the sequence seems to go roughly like this:

1. Set the first line

2. Begin hauling it

3. Cut it in half mid-haul

4. Set the second line

5. Haul the second line in full

6. Go back and haul the remainder of the first set

A similar thing is that they set out the line with X baskets, then haul only half of them, 1/2 X , cut the mainline and join/connect another new set and set maybe ½ X baskets again, basically expanding the number of hooks by 50%

The result, when you look at it, is a pattern of overlapping rectangles. It's visually distinctive, which is partly why it's starting to catch our attention in vessel-tracking data.

So why does this matter?

These kinds of manoeuvres are becoming increasingly visible in monitoring systems, and they raise some genuinely interesting questions about how fishing effort and catch data get captured.

As you see below, other h than the RMI-based fleet (upper left corner) that fishes in the standard parallel and coordinated among vessels of the same company style, the rectangle way is taking over on other EEZ and HS.

When a vessel conducts a complex, interleaved set-and-haul sequence like this, how well does a traditional logsheet capture this? To answer that, I’d like to understand the reasons and logistics of the manoeuvring.

Getting this right matters, not to create more paperwork for anyone, but because regional monitoring standards need to keep pace with how fishing is actually done out there. If the data doesn't reflect modern operations, it doesn't serve anyone well.

Here's where I love your help if you know more about this

Has been a long time since I was on the bridge of an operation longliner, so I may be seeing this with old eyes; hence, I’m at the early stages of trying to understand this properly — which means what I need most right now isn't large volumes of data. I’m after examples and operational insight.

Specifically, I’m curious about:

• How these operations actually play out in practice on the water

• How skippers and crew sequence the deployments and hauling activities

• How vessels typically record what they've done in the official logsheets, with, or under EM

Have you seen this? Have you done this? Does the description above match something you recognise, or does it miss the mark in ways that would be useful to flag?

I’m genuinely keen to hear from skippers, crew, observers, fishing companies, anyone with a window into how these operations work on the water. Anything shared will be treated confidentially and used solely to improve my understanding of current fishing practices.

So yeah… if you've got ideas, stories, or just a hunch about how this works — I’m more than happy to hear them.

Reach out directly at franciscoblaha(at)mac.com. Thank you.

Disclaimer: No confidential information is being disclosed; all these images are from Starboard.nz, which is the platform I work on most, but they will be visible to anyone on other platforms, such as GFW or Skylight.

When the Physics Doesn't Quite Fit the Biology

I like papers that make me think... And I like thinking. It's not about fish, or food, or the sea… not directly anyway.

But it touches on something that has always kind of bothered me: the moment when a theory gets so much respect that people stop questioning it.

This paper by Marshall and colleagues is a polite but firm reminder that physics borrowed into biology is only as good as the biology it wraps around, and that a model that fits the data is not the same as one that explains it.

“Schematic representation of water flows across the gills of a fish”. From a different paper I enjoyed: The gill-oxygen limitation theory (GOLT) and its critics. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abc6050

There's a fish growth example in here that will resonate with anyone who has thought about how fish actually grow. And there's a Borges reference, which is always a good sign for me as a fan of its writing.

When someone tells you that larger cells are constrained by surface-area-to-volume ratios, or that fish stop growing because their gills can't keep up with their oxygen demands, it feels solid. Grounded. The laws of physics, after all, don't negotiate. So when biology leans on them, the resulting theories seem to inherit that same authority.

A new review paper, Second thoughts about first principles in biology, in Trends in Ecology & Evolution by Marshall, White, Savage, and Levine (2026) pushes back on this confidence, not to demolish first-principles approaches in biology, but to make them better. The authors argue that many of biology's most influential theories, despite claiming physics as their foundation, are built on incomplete physics, hidden biological assumptions, or both. And the field's habit of validating theories by how well their predictions fit the data, rather than by scrutinising their assumptions, has left these problems largely unexamined. 

It's a paper that rewards careful reading, not least because the authors are candid enough to use some of their own past mistakes as examples.

What Are First-Principles Approaches?

A first-principles approach in biology means building theory upward from established physical or chemical laws, rather than fitting curves to data and working backwards. The appeal is obvious: if your theory is grounded in physics, it should apply broadly, depend less on the quirks of any one species, and require fewer empirically estimated parameters to get off the ground. Examples that have worked well include Stokes' law predicting how pollen disperses in wind, and how marine snow sinks through the water column, elegant applications of well-understood fluid dynamics.

Many of biology's big theoretical frameworks use this approach, including the Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE), Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory, and the Gill Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT) for fish growth. All three purport to derive their predictions from first principles of physics. The authors examine each and find that, in different ways, each falls short of the standard it claims.

The Problem of Incomplete Physics

The first issue the paper identifies is what the authors call "unaccounted-for physics": situations where the physical principles invoked are real and valid but incomplete for the biological context in which they're applied.

They illustrate this with cell size, a topic where the surface-area-to-volume ratio is invoked almost reflexively. The argument goes: larger cells have less surface area relative to their volume, so by Fick's law, they face greater constraints on resource uptake. Smaller cells should therefore be favoured when resources are scarce, and under warming, which increases metabolic demand, smaller cells should be even more strongly selected. It's intuitive. It has the feel of inevitability.

But the physics is incomplete. Whether surface area or diffusion rate limits resource uptake depends critically on whether the cell is moving. A swimming or sinking cell creates thinner boundary layers around itself, dramatically reducing diffusion barriers. A cell of 1000 micrometres in diameter acquires resources 300 times faster when swimming than when still. When you include this covariance between cell size and swimming speed (which is not captured by simple surface-area arguments), you get a very different picture of how cell size should respond to warming. Some models that include this physics reach the opposite conclusion to those that don't. 

The fish growth case is developed at length in the paper's Box 1, and it's worth dwelling on. The Gill Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT), one of the more prominent modern theories of fish body size, proposes that the surface area of gills scales sublinearly with body size. As a fish grows, the argument runs, its metabolic oxygen demand eventually outpaces what its gills can deliver, and growth halts. Under warming, when oxygen demand rises further, this constraint bites at a smaller size, so fish should shrink in a warming ocean. It's a theory with significant implications for fisheries science and climate change biology.

GOLT grounds itself in Fick's second law of diffusion, making it sound like settled physics. But the authors show that, as typically formulated, GOLT treats gill surface area as the only body-size-dependent variable in its gas-exchange equation. In reality, two other terms in that equation also change with body size: gill tissue thickness decreases as fish get larger, and the boundary layer of water around the gills (the main barrier to oxygen transfer in water-breathing fish) thins as larger fish swim faster and ventilate more vigorously.

When these terms are allowed to vary with body size, as a more complete application of the physics requires, the conclusion reverses: larger fish may be less oxygen-constrained than smaller ones, not more. Similarly, GOLT excludes the effect of temperature on Krogh's diffusion coefficient, which increases with warmth, meaning the theory overestimates diffusive barriers in warmer water and underestimates how well fish can supply themselves with oxygen as temperatures rise.

This isn't a minor technical quibble. These omissions underpin predictions that feed directly into climate-change models for marine ecosystems and fisheries management.

Hidden Biological Assumptions

The second issue is subtler and, in some ways, more troubling. First-principles approaches can smuggle in biological assumptions so naturally that they go unnoticed, even by their authors.

The paper's authors confess to having done exactly this in their own work on carbon uptake in photosynthesising cells. They predicted, based on Fick's law and surface-area scaling, that larger cells would struggle to meet their inorganic carbon demands. When they tested this experimentally, the prediction failed: larger cells simply upregulated the density of carbon transporters on their surface and evaded the constraint entirely. The physics was real, but the assumption that transporter density was size-independent was not, and that assumption had never been stated explicitly.

Similar hidden assumptions lurk in larger theories. MTE famously predicts that metabolic rate scales with body mass to the 0.75 power, derived from the geometry of fractal distribution networks. The argument for why these networks should be optimally efficient invokes evolutionary logic: efficient networks leave more energy for reproduction. But this implicitly assumes that total energy intake is independent of network efficiency, an assumption with major consequences that received far less scrutiny than the scaling exponent itself, which became the focus of intense and largely inconclusive debate.

The Prediction-Explanation Fallacy

Here, the paper makes its sharpest point. Across all the examples discussed, the dominant response to each theory's critics has been to point to predictive success: the theory predicts that organisms shrink with warming, and they do; it predicts metabolic scaling of 0.75, and that's roughly what's observed; it predicts that larger organisms grow more slowly, and they do. Surely this is evidence that the theory is right?

The authors call this the prediction-explanation fallacy, and illustrate it with the story of Clever Hans — a horse famous in the early twentieth century for appearing to solve arithmetic problems by tapping his hoof. Hans consistently got the right answers. The problem was that he wasn't doing arithmetic at all; he was responding to subtle, unconscious postural cues from his interlocutors. He predicted the right answer for entirely the wrong reasons.

A theory that fits the data is not thereby proven to explain the data. Multiple theories with very different assumptions can often yield the same predictions, as the paper demonstrates across growth, metabolic scaling, and cell size. Prediction is a necessary condition for a good theory, but it is not sufficient.

The Map That Becomes Useless

None of this means, as the authors are careful to say, that first-principles approaches should be abandoned. It means they need to be built and evaluated more rigorously.

The paper borrows Jorge Luis Borges's image of the perfect map, a map so detailed that it replicates the territory exactly and is therefore completely useless. Theories should not seek to capture every nuance of the phenomenon they describe; otherwise, they would be as useless as Borges's perfect map.

Simplification is not just acceptable; it's necessary. But simplification requires choices about what to include and what to leave out, and those choices carry assumptions… assumptions that should be stated, tested where possible, and scrutinised with the same rigour as the physics they accompany.

The authors propose a three-part test for first-principles theories: completeness (are all the factors that covary with the trait of interest actually included?), clarity (are both included and excluded assumptions explicitly stated?), and congruence (is the physics appropriate for the scale at which the biology is operating?). They also argue for a shift in how debates about these theories are conducted, away from battles over predictive fit and towards scrutiny of the assumptions that lie beneath.

For those who have spent time considering how fish grow, how they cope with warming oceans, or how marine ecosystems respond to change, this paper offers a useful corrective. The physics matters. But so does the biology that surrounds it. 

Marshall, D. et al. (2026). Second thoughts about first principles in biology. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2026.04.010

Emerging Thawing Technologies

Why How You Thaw Your Fish Matters More Than You Think

While I was fishing commercially and going to university, I was always the guy who wrote all the documentation on board... and there was a lot of writing to do!

Confronting the paper work on the Ocean Dawn, aNZ factory twawler that produced filled hoki at the end of the 90s … NZ fisheries and seafood paper work is really heavy, yet that was my job!

You have the fisheries side (logsheets, reports, etc.), the maritime side (safety, logbooks, radio, etc), the labour side (working hours, crew safety), and the seafood safety side (cleaning records, maintenance, etc.). While fishing in the WCPO in the 90s, most of it was the FFA log sheets and port entries.

Only after the WCPFC was established did we get the standardised ones. And once in NZ, the whole HACCP world and the deepening of market access requirements kicked in, and not many people were doing that... so I rode the wave and did a lot of work on the seafood safety side of fishing... “Once fish is on deck, it becomes food”, and a whole other regulatory universe becomes necessary, one that, until the last two decades, wasn’t as critical as now.

Partly because of that, I did my 2nd master's in Seafood Science, as I knew fish but wanted credibility in ‘fish as food’, particularly since it was associated with the official certification world, which prepared me for what was to come with the various catch certifications and CDS.

I did a lot of work around that. In fact, the EU itself contracted me for over 10 years to train seafood inspectors on vessels and at landing sites worldwide, including in Europe. I wrote guides on the EU certifications and even a chapter in a book on refrigeration on board, which is still quoted today.

I found the physics and chemistry of freezing very interesting, as well as the best relationship between fishing methods and types. For example, it would be ridiculous to use blast or plate freezing on a purse seiner, just as it would be ridiculous to use brine freezing on a longliner or a hoki trawler. Yet the corollary of freezing, namely thawing, didn't get much attention those days… mostly you just took it out of the freezer and left it in a cold, humid place, or directly in water before processing…

Things have changed, and this particular paper brings updates to a lot of the newer methods… not all related to fish… for now… yet the nerd in me likes to learn new tricks for old methods.

So yeah, here is a summary of the paper, but as always, I recommend you read the original.

Freezing is the backbone of the global meat and seafood trade. Vast quantities of fish, beef, pork, and poultry are frozen and shipped around the world every day, typically stored at −18°C or below. The problem isn't the freezing itself — it's what comes next.

Traditional thawing methods, such as leaving the product at room temperature or running it under water, are slow, wasteful, and damaging. As ice crystals melt, they disrupt muscle fibres, cause water to leak out (known as drip loss), and create ideal conditions for bacterial growth. That drip loss isn't just water — it carries soluble proteins, vitamins, and other nutrients. For the food industry, this translates directly into lost weight, quality, and money. For anyone operating within a HACCP framework, it also represents a Critical Control Point that demands close attention.

The damage goes deeper than the surface. Thawing triggers a cascade of chemical changes: proteins unfold and denature, fats oxidise and develop off-flavours, and the muscle’s fine microstructure — the tight bundles of fibres that give it texture — breaks down. The longer the thaw takes, the worse these effects become.

What Actually Goes Wrong Inside the Muscle

The review identifies four main areas of quality deterioration during thawing, all of which will be familiar to anyone who has worked seriously with frozen seafood.

Water-holding capacity is arguably the most commercially important. During freezing, water forms ice crystals outside muscle cells. When it thaws, an osmotic imbalance draws water out rather than back in. The result is the spongy, pale, wet surface you sometimes see on thawed product. Once this water is lost, so are the nutrients dissolved in it. Fish and crustaceans are particularly vulnerable here because their connective tissue is structurally weaker than mammalian muscle, making their cell walls more susceptible to irreversible ice-crystal damage.

Protein changes are subtler but equally significant. Roughly 20% of muscle is protein, and these proteins — particularly the myofibrillar proteins that control texture — are highly sensitive to freeze-thaw cycles. During thawing, protein structures partially unfold, hydrogen bonds weaken, and reactive oxygen species attack them. This is why thawed product can turn mushy or lose elasticity. Fish myosin is notably less stable than its mammalian counterpart, so temperature control during seafood thawing needs to be stricter.

Lipid oxidation is the primary cause of off-flavours and reduced shelf life. When cellular compartments rupture during thawing, fats come into contact with oxygen and iron-containing compounds in the drip fluid, accelerating rancidity. Seafood faces heightened risk here because of its high content of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which are far more chemically reactive than the saturated fats that dominate red meat. Anyone who has thawed tuna or salmon poorly knows exactly what this smells like.

Finally, microstructural damage — visible under electron microscopy — reveals physical tearing of muscle fibres, widened gaps between cells, and disrupted connective tissue. These gaps become channels through which additional water and nutrients escape, compounding the drip loss problem.

Seven Technologies Changing the Game

The review evaluates seven emerging thawing technologies, each based on different physical principles.

High-Voltage Electric Field (HVEF) thawing uses a strong DC electric field to reorient water molecules in the ice, accelerating melting without generating significant heat. It shows real promise for inhibiting microbial growth, but requires careful calibration. Exceed the right voltage threshold, and you enter corona discharge territory, generating ozone that accelerates fat oxidation — the opposite of what you want, especially with PUFA-rich seafood.

Ohmic thawing passes an alternating electrical current directly through the product, generating heat uniformly from within via electrical resistance. One study found it thawed frozen tuna more than five times faster than water immersion, while preserving nutrient content. The main concern is the potential migration of metallic ions from the electrodes into the food if parameters aren't tightly controlled.

Microwave thawing generates internal heat by exciting water molecules with high-frequency electromagnetic waves — a principle familiar to anyone who has used a domestic microwave. The limitation is uneven heating. The classic "still frozen in the middle, cooking on the outside" problem is a genuine quality and safety concern in industrial settings, causing localised protein denaturation and textural damage.

Radiofrequency (RF) thawing operates on the same electromagnetic principle but at much lower frequencies — around 27 MHz, compared with 2,450 MHz for microwaves. The longer wavelengths penetrate more deeply and more evenly, making RF particularly well-suited to large commercial frozen blocks. Several studies confirm that it produces a more uniform temperature distribution than microwaves, with significantly less surface overheating.

Ultrasound-assisted thawing uses high-intensity sound waves to induce cavitation — microscopic bubbles that collapse, releasing intense local heat and pressure, thereby accelerating thawing and inhibiting microbial growth. The trade-off is that excessive power can mechanically damage muscle fibres. Research into multi-frequency ultrasound systems, which use transducers operating at multiple frequencies simultaneously, shows considerable promise in overcoming this limitation.

Low-temperature, high-humidity (LHT) thawing surrounds the product with near-saturated humid air at temperatures just above freezing. The humidity forms a thin water film on the surface, which blocks oxygen and dramatically slows oxidation. Of the seven technologies reviewed, LHT consistently produced the best results for preserving water-holding capacity and minimising lipid oxidation. Its main drawback is speed — it is the slowest of the methods examined.

Vacuum thawing reduces atmospheric pressure, causing water vapour to condense on the frozen product's surface and release latent heat that drives thawing. The low-oxygen environment effectively prevents oxidation, but the process can cause moisture loss through sublimation. Recent developments — particularly vacuum sublimation-rehydration thawing — aim to address this by reintroducing water during the thawing cycle.

So Which Is Best?

The honest answer is that it depends on your operational priorities. The review is clear: no single technology wins across all criteria.

For large-scale industrial operations where speed and uniformity matter most, RF thawing is the most practical standalone method. For operations where quality preservation is the priority — minimising drip loss, protecting protein structure, and limiting oxidation — LHT thawing delivers the best outcomes. For the optimal balance of speed and quality, the combination of microwave and ultrasound-assisted thawing emerges as the most scientifically robust hybrid approach, with each technology compensating for the other's weaknesses.

Technologies such as standalone vacuum thawing and ultrasound remain largely confined to the laboratory scale, hampered by scalability challenges and equipment costs.

The Road Ahead

The review is candid about the gap between laboratory promise and industrial reality. Most studies have been conducted on small, neat samples in controlled settings, and there is a critical shortage of data on how these technologies perform on the large, irregularly shaped commercial blocks that real-world processing involves.

The authors identify three key pillars for future progress: integrating multiple physical technologies into combined systems; deploying machine learning and digital twin models to dynamically adjust thawing parameters in real time; and developing standardised Life Cycle Assessments to quantify the true energy and carbon costs of each approach.

For those of us who have spent careers thinking about what happens to fish between the moment it hits the deck and the moment it reaches the consumer, that last point feels particularly timely. The physics of freezing has always attracted attention. It's good to see thawing finally catching up.

Wang, Y. et al. (2026). Emerging Thawing Technologies for Frozen Muscle Foods: Mechanisms, Quality Impacts, and Industrial Prospects. Foods, 15, 1991. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods15111991