Dynamite fishing

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Dynamite fishing

As dynamite fishing is defined as the fishing with explosives. Explosives are released into the water, which means that a wide variety of living things, including edible animals, die and can be fished. Today dynamite is often no longer used for this, but other, stronger or easier to manufacture explosives. Fishing with hand grenades or military explosive weapons is also included.

Dynamite fishing is banned or outlawed in almost every country in the world.

functionality

A watertight, weighted explosive device is thrown into the water, which sinks and explodes below the surface. Depending on the explosive device, the depth and the distance of the fish from the explosion, they are destroyed, killed, made unable to swim or stunned by the pressure wave. The effect is more devastating than a comparable explosion in air, since water, like many liquids, is practically incompressible and has a much greater density than air. Sometimes the fish are fed beforehand to gather a school under the boat.

The only fish of interest to the fisherman are those that are so far from the center of the explosion that they cannot swim or are stunned so that they can be collected with nets . In many of these fish, however, the swim bladder has burst and they sink to the bottom. Destroyed fish, non-edible fish and all other affected organisms are left behind.

Spread of dynamite fishing

In Europe, dynamite fishing in inland waters became more widespread in the post-war period, when there was widespread food shortages and the population still had explosives or grenades that had been discarded in the chaos of war. Today, dynamite fishing in Europe no longer occurs or is only a rare crime. She is punished very severely for breaking several laws, most of which include possession of weapons of war, causing an explosive device, and poaching .

Today, dynamite fishing is particularly widespread in Southeast Asia and in some other areas of Asia, in the Caribbean and Africa , but also in the Mediterranean region, with a sharp increase from around the mid-1980s. The self-made explosives (for example ammonium nitrate fertilizer in plastic canisters) are usually thrown from a boat into the water, where they swim several meters deep or explode on the bottom. The reasons for this illegal, nonselective fishing method lie in the poverty of the population and a lack of education. In ignorance of the ecosystem context, the method is considered effective, progressive and good.

effectiveness

Dynamite fishing is very attractive to fishermen because they can catch a large amount of fish quickly. It's cheap, there are no nets to buy or repair. The maintenance work on land is shorter. Fishing with explosives is the most effective method available to fishermen. Immediately after their introduction, a high yield is quickly achieved.

From an ecological point of view, the method is very inefficient. The proportion of fish caught in relation to the number of injured individuals is in the per mil range. Most of the animals killed are of no interest to the fisherman, are comparable to bycatch or are other sea creatures such as mussels, crustaceans, molluscs, small organisms, corals, etc. Even in the mass fraction of the edible fish reached by the explosion, the yield is a maximum of 30-40%. About a third of the coveted fish sinks inaccessible to the sea floor, about 10–20% is carried away by the current and another 10–20% is removed by predatory fish. In addition, there is a fluctuating and difficult to estimate amount of food fish that are in the edge areas of the pressure wave, are only slightly damaged and later die.

Hazards and environmental damage

The damage to the environment is very high. The explosive device kills all living things, regardless of whether they are suitable for human consumption. Above all, the offspring are also killed, so that overfishing occurs very quickly . Toxic reaction residues from the explosives pollute the water. Underwater landscapes, coral reefs and vegetation are often irreversibly destroyed and remove the basis for repopulation by schools of fish. Many fishing areas and diving spots in the whole of Southeast Asia were severely destroyed for years to the point of total loss. Many of the slowly growing corals , especially the branched coral types, are an important protected area for young fish and fry and are now missing. Most legal and illegal fishing methods on their own usually cannot destroy a stable ecosystem. However, there are also synergy effects , as a result of which fishing has almost completely collapsed in large, coastal areas and lakes that were once excellent fishing grounds.

Further dangers are connected with the manufacture, storage and trading of the explosives on land. Chemicals that are harmful to health are often used. The dangers for the fishermen are too close to the surface or explosive devices exploding in the boat. Hand amputations, blindness and other injuries are common. Since around 2000, increased controls on dynamite fishing and seizures have resulted in an increasing switch to the illegal use of cyanide , especially because it can be used silently.

In some areas of Southeast Asia, dynamite fishing and coral bleaching have destroyed the marine life so thoroughly that the reefs died and the coast was no longer protected. The collapsed fish stocks were the smallest problem here. Because the sea washes away people's habitats after the reefs no longer protect the coast. It is not possible to move to other areas due to the high population density. The scientist Wolf Hilbertz was asked to build artificial reefs made of structural steel off the coast of Indonesia .

Trivia

The plot of the novel Raubfischer in Hellas by Werner Helwig takes place in the milieu of dynamite fishermen in Greece in the early 1930s. The novel was filmed under the same title in 1959 by Horst Hächler with Maria Schell and Cliff Robertson in the leading roles.

During his Aegean expedition in 1942, diving pioneer Hans Hass made extensive use of the technique of dynamite fishing, which was already illegal at the time. The explosions attracted sharks, which Hass could then film.

Also Alfons skyscrapers , the employees of Hans Hass, had an ambivalent relationship to dynamite fishing.

In the movie The Great Blue Road from 1957 (Italian: La grande strada azzurra ) with Yves Montand , the focus is on bomb fishing; Yves Montand plays the fisherman Squarcio, a lovable father who struggles between family responsibility and this life-threatening method of fishing. Terence Hill (Mario Girotti) plays a supporting role in this film.

In the movie Crocodile Dundee II with Paul Hogan , the protagonist passes the time while dynamite fishing in the Hudson River .

In the movie The Great Race of Belleville, the triplets “Les Triplettes de Belleville” use stick grenades to fish for frogs in the pond.

In the movie Turkish for Beginners , Cem goes out dynamite fishing to catch fish for dinner.

Furthermore, dynamite fishing occurs in the movie carbide and sorrel (here with an ethyne explosion).

swell

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans Hass: Menschen und Haie , Orell Füssli Verlag, Zurich 1949, z. BS 295 ff. Also documented in the feature film People Among Sharks from 1947.
  2. ↑ http://www.alfons-hochhauser.de/bei-den-raubfischern.html .