Article Summary:

Huffington Post has published a brief report by James Morgan on the human and environmental effects of dynamite fishing in the Coral Triangle. Due to decreasing fish stocks, many local fishermen are making improvised explosives. They are:

“Grinding up match heads and combining them with sand and fertilizer. The concoction is then put in an empty soft drink bottle, lit and thrown onto reefs where it decimates coral, killing all the fish within its blast radius. This practice has arisen as a result of rapidly declining fish stocks. As the number of fish decreases, fishermen are turning to more and more destructive measures in order to feed themselves and their families.”

The report features some powerful images of the human cost of this practice. The Coral Triangle is a geographical term so named as it refers to a roughly triangular area of the tropical marine waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. (Image by James Morgan)