Illegal Fishing Threatens Galápagos Islands Waters

That just changed.

A grant from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provided new engines and some modern radar equipment, ensuring rangers now move as fast as the poachers. A new seaplane acts as a spotter, scouring vast stretches of sea in a matter of hours, keeping in touch with boat-bound rangers by radio. A California-based conservation group, Wild Aid, helps train and finance rangers.

Printer Friendly

Email to a Friend

What's This?

I'm out on patrol with them to witness the challenges they face and the otherworldly beauty they're protecting.

Patrolling Paradise

For one week, we motor through some of the most inaccessible corners of the Galápagos. It's a journey which reveals both its beauty and its problems. Even with new equipment, trying to patrol such a vast area of ocean is incredibly difficult.

We head for the island of Isabella, considered ground zero for illegal fishing. Much of what rangers do is basic detective work. We jump onto small dinghies and go ashore constantly, looking for camps.

Most of our time is spent cleaning debris from camps where illegal fishermen have already come and gone. We're consistently a few paces behind the people we're supposed to be policing. We collect rusting oil drums, discarded clothes, and rotting batteries from fragile mangroves and lava beds that shatter under our feet like broken glass.

The westernmost island, Fernandina, is considered one of the most pristine islands in the Pacific Ocean. We head for the west coast and hike into the type of wild landscape I've dreamed of experiencing since I was a child.

Sea Sanctuary

Protected lagoons are filled with baby sea lions. They swim right up to my feet, checking me out—the curiosity clearly mutual. Flightless cormorants are building nests of red sea weed on black rocky ground. Green sea turtles rest on the shore and penguins are waddling off for a swim.

All of them are vulnerable to the illegal long lines that crisscross this watery park like spider webs.

These translucent fishing lines, secured with buoys that float at the surface, can stretch as much as 80 miles (130 kilometers), and dangle with hundreds of baited hooks. Long lines are menacing because they are so indiscriminate: Almost any animal will take the bait.

On average fully half of the animals caught on long lines can't be sold and are thrown away—manta rays, sea lions, sea birds. That quickly drains the life from an ecosystem.

But long lines are cheap and easy to use, so they are a tool of choice for fishermen worldwide and illegal fishermen here.

They are hardly visible at the surface, making them incredibly difficult to detect. We didn't find anything along the park's western edge, so we headed for the northern islands of Darwin and Wolf, a favorite haunt for both sharks and the people who hunt them.

Scouring the Seas

At Wolf there is a stunning surprise. Hundreds of dolphins surround our boat. Their abundance is a reminder of how wild these waters still are, but also of what will be lost if this place is over fished. Large populations of dolphins need a lot of food. If what they eat is exploited, their populations also crash.

We finish our patrol on the eastern side of the park. The rangers constantly scan a vast, moving sea with binoculars and find nothing.

Back at park headquarters on the island of Santa Cruz a few days later, the director, Edwin Naula, throws open a shed holding some of the 4,000 shark fins confiscated just in the last year. Galápagos sharks, hammerheads, blues, duskies—all of their distinctive fins are jammed into black burlap sacks that pile to the ceiling.

Shark fins are worth as much as U.S. $80 per pound. The contraband at park headquarters has a market value totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. With that kind of money at stake, fishermen are not going to back out of this reserve quietly.

Three weeks after I arrive in the Galápagos, local fishermen go on strike. They are demanding that long lines be legalized, and threaten violence if it doesn't happen. In the meantime, they've wrapped barbed wire around park headquarters, shutting down patrols.

That leaves the islands completely unprotected.

Whether the Galápagos will remain one of the world's last great pristine places or something closer to a commercial fishery remains to be seen. The current illegal fishing involves too many people fishing too small a place—without any controls, the entire system will crash.

That's what happened in mainland Ecuador, driving people into the Galápagos reserve in the first place.

The same mistakes are now being made in the Galápagos. More money can be garnered over the long run by leaving this place alone and cashing in on tourist dollars, but fishermen who don't speak English and don't stand to profit from tourism are more interested in their immediate survival.

Their determination to peel back the protected status of this place, and the lack of alternatives that makes them so committed to their goal, puts the future of the Galápagos up for grabs.

For more on the Galápagos Islands, tune in to this week's National Geographic On Assignment. The show airs Monday, March 15 at 7 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT in the United States and is available only on the National Geographic Channel.

Got a high-speed connection? Watch National Geographic On Assignment in streaming video.