Bang! My pleasant underwater meditation was shattered by the impossibly loud sound of an explosion—it was like I stuck my head inside a 50-gallon drum when an M-80 went off. The metallic crack of the dynamite blast was so powerful and seemed so nearby that I thought the pressurized scuba tank of my friend who was also surveying this section of reef with me, had exploded. It scared the hell out of me. It’s been two years since that scary afternoon, and in that time I’ve learned a lot about why a stick of dynamite blew up under the water a few hundred yards away from us. Although many people call it dynamite “fishing”, reef bombing is really closer to the truth. A homemade stick of dynamite is tossed into the sea by a couple guys in a little outrigger canoe bobbing on the waves. Fragile branching corals splinter and shatter like porcelain chandeliers, while the reef fish and other animals that lived here float up to the surface with dead eyes fixed in a glassy stare. I was told this section of reef had already been bombed so much that the fish population was nearly obliterated already, but the vicious cycle of desperation by subsistence fishermen using dynamite to kill and catch what few fish still remained continued on. This is the typical end of dynamite fishing—it’s almost like a junkie’s first flirtation with heroin.
Phillipines RPCV Tommy Schultz writes: Although many people call it dynamite “fishing”, reef bombing is really closer to the truth
Saving Nemo: One Peace Corps volunteer’s experience in the Philippines
Tommy Schultz
May 30, 2007
VIRGINIA - The afternoon sun filtered through the surface of the calm sea, intensifying the kaleidoscopic colors of the coral reef like an October sunset on a hillside covered in changing leaves. I was 30 feet underwater, exploring a section of reef along a survey transect line and looking for unusual species to take pictures of for our environmental assessment. Drifting weightlessly along and propelled forward by relaxed kicks from my fins, I let my mind stray from the immediate task of taking photos and just took in the beauty of the coral garden for a few minutes.
Bang!
My pleasant underwater meditation was shattered by the impossibly loud sound of an explosion—it was like I stuck my head inside a 50-gallon drum when an M-80 went off. The metallic crack of the dynamite blast was so powerful and seemed so nearby that I thought the pressurized scuba tank of my friend who was also surveying this section of reef with me, had exploded. It scared the hell out of me.
It’s been two years since that scary afternoon, and in that time I’ve learned a lot about why a stick of dynamite blew up under the water a few hundred yards away from us. Although many people call it dynamite “fishing”, reef bombing is really closer to the truth. A homemade stick of dynamite is tossed into the sea by a couple guys in a little outrigger canoe bobbing on the waves. Fragile branching corals splinter and shatter like porcelain chandeliers, while the reef fish and other animals that lived here float up to the surface with dead eyes fixed in a glassy stare.
I was told this section of reef had already been bombed so much that the fish population was nearly obliterated already, but the vicious cycle of desperation by subsistence fishermen using dynamite to kill and catch what few fish still remained continued on. This is the typical end of dynamite fishing—it’s almost like a junkie’s first flirtation with heroin.
Here’s how the story usually goes: a fisherman visits a bigger city and brings back a couple of sticks of dynamite. One afternoon he tosses it onto his home reef and the blast brings up more fish than he usually catches in a week of fishing with a handline, net or other traditional fishing method. His family gets a short-term jackpot of cash from selling the huge harvest at the local market, but pretty soon the neighbors catch on and buy dynamite themselves or even worse start making it at home.
After only a few months or years the fishing village that used to catch enough fish to feed all the families has found their home reef more closely resembles an underwater shopping mall parking lot and many fishermen are stumping around on crutches with missing hands, legs and arms because of faulty homemade fuses detonating the bombs too early.
The Pandora’s box of dynamite fishing was opened about 40 years ago on a small island called Apo located a few miles off the coast of the Philippines’ Negros Island province in the Mindanao Sea. Jutting like a jagged, volcanic tooth out of the nearly 700-foot deep Tañon Strait the island is home to about a thousand people—90% of whom are subsistence fishermen.
After only a few years of dynamite “fishing”, the delicate reef fringing the island was mostly reduced to a calcified rubble so that even today the sand on Apo’s beaches is made up of golf-tee sized bits of broken coral, worn smooth by the waves and resembling millions of tiny bones.
The marine biologists from Silliman University’s Marine Lab in nearby Dumaguete had witnessed first-hand the devastation brought by dynamite fishing in the nearby communities on the coast, but for years had struggled to find a solution to reverse this worsening problem. Even though it is illegal to use dynamite for fishing, government attempts to reduce the demolition of the country’s fragile reefs weren’t effective.
But in 1982, a few pioneering scientists from the Marine Lab approached the Apo Island community with the idea of creating a marine sanctuary there. Apo’s fishermen were catching fewer and fewer fish to feed their families and most of them realized they needed help. Also, the Marine Lab was looking for a case study for the new science of marine sanctuaries, and after all the flattened reef of the proposed sanctuary site wasn’t used anymore since the fish were already dead. The community leaders held a vote, and it was agreed to establish one of the first marine sanctuaries in the country.
At the time, the idea of a community-based sanctuary was a new idea in the Philippines and it took some getting used to. Most people had grown up fishing wherever they wanted to whenever they wanted—no “fishing seasons” or slot limits like we have in the States. For the first few years after the buoys went up to mark the area off-limits to fishing nobody really cared—there weren’t any fish to catch there anyway. But after five years of no fishing, a small school of jacks (looks a lot like a small tuna) returned to Apo.
This was big news since the jacks were among the first species to disappear when the bombs started dropping on the reef in the years before. Even though the fish weren’t fully grown, everyone noticed that they chose the protection of the sanctuary area for their home. A few years later, after this newly-returned school of jacks had matured, they moved out of the marine sanctuary and suspended in the crystalline depths of Apo Island’s rocky Cogon Point.
The strong deep-sea currents brought a steady supply of small fish and marine animals for them to eat, and the fish grew rapidly from the steady supply of food. Cogon Point also happens to be the traditional fishing ground of the island’s fishermen—the sanctuary had begun to pay off already.
With the return of valuable market fish like the jacks, pressure to open up the sanctuary to fishing intensified within the community, and Liberty Pacobello, the Barangay Captain (kind of like a small town mayor) fought to turn the tide of public opinion back towards keeping the sanctuary closed. The will of the islanders to protect the fragile success of their new sanctuary was about to undergo its most difficult test. (To be continued)
Tommy Schultz was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines from 2004 to 2006, and worked in regions such as Bohol and Negros Oriental.
