Google Earth Images Caught Persian Gulf Fishermen Breaking International Law

We hang security cameras in convenient stores to deter would-be thieves, so why not apply the same approach to the world's oceans, to assure fisherman aren't overfishing by monitoring them with satellite imagery from space?

That's what researchers at the University of British Columbia decided to do. And they found that countries in the Persian Gulf neglected to report some 25,000 tons of caught fish to the United Nations, per an international law meant to address the widespread overfishing problem.

Researchers looked at satellite photos from Google Earth, from 2005, and estimated about 31,000 tons of fish were caught in nearly 2,000 weirs along the Persian Gulf. That's six times as was reported, according to catch data from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

Experts have known that many countries around the world under-report their catch. Now researchers say new technology can and should be used to monitor fishing practices to catch them in the lie. According to the report, titled "Managing Fisheries from Space," it's also a cost-effective way to spot other illegal and damaging practices occurring in the ocean, like verifying the size of oil spills.

The university teamed up on the study, published yesterday in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, with the Sea Around Us project, an initiative to study the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems to protect the environment. Per the report:

Fishery catch statistics are often unreliable. Statistics submitted annually by member countries to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) frequently neglect or under-report the contribution of small-scale fisheries, as well as illegal catches and discards. In the wake of global overfishing, negligent reporting can lead to poor policy decisions that jeopardize food security, impair resource conservation, and generate incorrect assumptions that global catch trends are plateauing or even increasing.

Weirs are semi-permanent pens, made of bamboo and wire mesh, that trap fish by taking advantage of tidal differences. Since they're over 1,000 feet long and anchored down, they're relatively easy targets to capture with Google Earth.

Researchers were able to see 1,656 weirs in the collection images, and used an algorithm to estimate how many traps were harder make out in images with limited visibility—another 500 or so. They then calculated the size of the catch based on historic data of how many marine creatures the traps hold, and the type of fish most likely to be scooped up at that location and time of year.

"These results, which speak to the unreliability of officially reported fisheries statistics, provide the first example of fisheries catch estimates from space," researchers wrote.