00:00Far off the northeast coast of Madagascar lies the Saya Damala Bank.
00:06It rises from the deep seafloor to shallow depths, creating a unique ecosystem of marine
00:11life in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
00:14It's distinctly shallow.
00:15This is the largest plateau in the world in terms of ocean plateaus.
00:23And in some places it's as shallow as 10 meters.
00:27What that means is that sunlight can reach the floor.
00:30So it's almost like a beachfront, flush with sunlight and lots of creatures.
00:36That's the Saya Damala.
00:37The seagrass that grows here is one of the world's most effective carbon sinks.
00:42The plant captures carbon up to 30 times faster than terrestrial forests.
00:47And the Saya Damala is the world's largest known seagrass field, for now.
00:52Its days may be numbered.
00:54For the past decade, industrial fishing fleets chasing diminishing fish stocks have been
00:59plying the bank's rich waters, pulling up tons of sea life and mowing down the seafloor.
01:06This is a really destructive form of fishing, very common in this area.
01:11It's destructive because it's indiscriminate.
01:13So it's grabbing everything in its path.
01:18And that means you're catching lots of bycatch or species that you weren't intending to consume
01:25or sell.
01:26Turtles, birds, sharks, whales, what have you.
01:29Bottom trawling in particular is destructive because it's on the bottom of the ocean.
01:33It's dragging it across the seafloor, which is essentially like putting a cable between
01:39two Humvees and driving across the Amazon and sort of knocking down everything in your
01:44path.
01:45The trawlers, mainly from Sri Lanka and Thailand, are delivering crushing blows to this delicate
01:51ecosystem.
01:52The bank lies in mostly international waters in the Indian Ocean, administered by the small
01:57island nation of Mauritius, 900 kilometers to the south, which cannot police this vast
02:03stretch of ocean the size of Switzerland.
02:06It makes the Saya Damala an attractive target.
02:09But it's not just the trawlers gobbling up everything in sight.
02:13So the Taiwanese fleet that's there are Taiwanese tuna long liners primarily.
02:18They're largely on the outskirts of the Saya Damala where the water gets deeper.
02:23So the edges of the plateau where tuna are more likely to be found.
02:28Tuna, as you know, is a very high priced target because a lot of types of tuna are already
02:35collapsed.
02:37They've disappeared in many other places in the world.
02:41And the Saya Damala is a place where there's a huge flow of tuna in that area.
02:47But because it's so far, historically other fleets haven't gone there, but the Taiwanese
02:51are now.
02:52But tuna aren't all that the Taiwanese boats are bringing up.
02:55The Saya Damala has an unusual concentration of sharks.
03:01The attraction for fishers, for fishing fleets of sharks is their fin.
03:07Their fin sells mostly to be used for shark fin soup.
03:11And so if you're targeting tuna, you can change your line in a small way and catch both tuna
03:19and shark.
03:20So it's pretty easy adjustment to make and you can bump up your revenue.
03:24So you're seeing a fair number of sharks being pulled onto Taiwanese vessels as well.
03:28And Taiwan, Hong Kong, China are the biggest markets for these fins.
03:33The extent to which Taiwan's tuna fleets are harvesting shark fins isn't fully known.
03:37What is known is that shark populations are under increasing pressure globally with many
03:41species threatened.
03:43And while human beings may have an aversion to sharks, they fill a critical niche in the
03:47health of the ocean.
03:48You know, they're the police of the sort of food triangle and they keep everything in
03:54check because they're apex predators and they eat everything below them.
03:59And so when they're gone, certain players below them can emerge to fill the void and
04:06then sort of knock everything out of whack.
04:09And you can see very rapid collapse of other kinds of species because things get out of
04:16balance.
04:17You lose the top apex predator and the entire habitat can fall apart.
04:23Taiwan has banned shark finning, which usually involves slicing the fins off live fish before
04:28dumping them overboard to a slow, helpless death.
04:32The practice remains profitable enough to make the occasional surprise port inspection
04:36worth the risk.
04:38And buying or selling the fins is legal.
04:40Restaurants openly advertise shark fin, popular in part because its high price carries prestige.
04:47Sharks are just one variable in a complex equation.
04:50Their removal hastens a collapse.
04:53Somewhere along the chain, a massive store of carbon is released from a vast field of
04:58dead seagrass.
05:00Without a cultural shift or effective regulation, human appetites will continue to leave, lasting
05:05scars on the biosphere, perhaps irreversibly.
05:10Patrick Chen and Jonathan Kaplan for Taiwan Plus.
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