SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Around the world, trawlers, gillnetters and other fishing boats harvest the seas undetected in places they shouldn't. New technology is combating that. New studies show how successful the battle has been. NPR's Lauren Sommer reports.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: There are small fishing boats, and then there are industrial fishing ships. They're basically floating factories at sea.
JENNIFER RAYNOR: Imagine a huge vessel on the water that is pulling in just vast, vast quantities of fish.
SOMMER: Jennifer Raynor is a natural resource economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She says these massive boats catch fish, process it, freeze it, and then other boats come to pick it up. So the operation doesn't have to stop.
RAYNOR: Sometimes these boats can be out there for two years at a time, just fishing nonstop in places that they never could have reached before.
SOMMER: These large vessels are now responsible for most of the global seafood catch. Raynor says many of these ships now have GPS transponders that report their position, but there are still blind spots.
RAYNOR: Those blind spots are that captains can disable this device. And you might expect that you'd be more likely to do that if you're doing things that are illegal. And many vessels are not required to use this system.
SOMMER: It's been hard to figure out the impact these dark vessels, as they're known, are having on marine life. Now, new technology is helping. Radar from European satellites is able to detect large vessels on the ocean. Raynor and her colleagues use all that tracking data to see how many vessels were in marine-protected areas, places where fishing is banned.
RAYNOR: Perhaps surprisingly, given how hard monitoring is and how vast these spaces can be, we found that poaching is surprisingly rare.
SOMMER: Almost 80% of the protected areas had no industrial fishing activity, which Raynor published in the journal Science.
RAYNOR: I think it's a very hopeful sign for conservation. At a bare minimum, we need compliance, right?
SOMMER: A study by other researchers also used the same tracking data. Raphael Seguin of the University of Montpellier in France looked at a bigger group of protected areas - places with some protections but that still allow some fishing. He found industrial fishing going on in about half of them.
RAPHAEL SEGUIN: Two-thirds of industrial fishing in these marine-protected areas were untracked. They were invisible to public tracking systems. And that means that we have underestimated what is actually going on in marine-protected areas.
SOMMER: Almost 200 countries have agreed to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030. Today, it's only about 8%. But Seguin says if there's industrial fishing in these protected areas, that goal doesn't mean much.
SEGUIN: Every area of the ocean that can be fished is fished today, so that's a big issue because when we say we want to protect 30% of the ocean, most of the time, it's false protection.
SOMMER: But Seguin says the potential is that these new satellite technologies could help countries with enforcement by tracking illegal fishing in real time, so protected areas of the ocean will actually be protected.
Lauren Sommer, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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