We’ve been filming on location in South East Asia for a while, and if there’s one thing you can’t escape here (besides the karaoke) it’s the seafood. We’ve seen fresh fish markets selling everything from tuna and puffer fish to Krakens and Mer-people. Being the inquisitive folks we are, we started asking the locals some questions about the fishing around here, and after doing some research, we stumbled across some pretty eye-opening things. Take a look for yourselves and don’t worry, we’re not going try and ruin your favorite food by telling you that some of the calamari you’ve eaten was probably pig rectum or anything gross like that.

1.)  The Coral Triangle Is The Most Beautiful Place You’ve Never Heard Of

Never heard of the Coral Triangle?  That’s ok, we hadn’t either until we began preparing to film there.  Suffice to say, the Coral Triangle is what happens when you mix a resort-style beach with the world’s best aquarium, expand it across an ocean and multiply it by paradise.

(We’ll give you a moment)

To catch everyone up, the Coral Triangle spans Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands, and its big claim to fame is the wildlife.  Now we don’t mean “drive through a park and watch baboons sit on your windshield” kind of wildlife.  The Coral Triangle is home to 75% of the world’s coral reef species, 40% of the world’s fish species and more mangrove forests than anywhere on the planet.  That’s pretty impressive when you consider the area only covers about 2% of the world’s ocean (which is still bigger than the Amazon Rainforest).  Organizations like The Nature Conservancy, which keep track of things like that, have called it “the epicenter of marine life abundancy and diversity on the planet.”

(Have you ever heard of the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon, the Serengeti?  BARREN!)

And the countries that are inside the Coral Triangle use every part of it  –  their tourism departments lure foreigners with white sand beaches and world class diving; at any given meal, you’re virtually guaranteed to have something fresh caught; even their economies are almost entirely dependent on the seafood trade.  But, of course there’s a darker side to that…

2.)  Fisherman Are Trading In Their Nets And Hooks For TNT

We all know that poaching is a problem pretty much anywhere there are animals that you’re not supposed to hunt/eat/wear/turn into an elaborately produced, but clinically suspect headache balm.  That’s not what we’re getting at here.  The big problem in South East Asia isn’t that fishermen are hunting protected sea life (though they’re doing that too), the issue is the method of fishing that’s being used to pull in record numbers of fish.

In the waters of the Coral Triangle, an estimated 70 percent of fish are “caught” by fisherman using levels of cyanide and dynamite typically reserved for assassination attempts on Adolph Hitler.  And that’s bad news for more than just the fish, its bad news for pretty much anyone who eats seafood.  See, cyanide and dynamite aren’t being used because fishermen in South East Asia have a vendetta against sea creatures; they’re being used because, as it turns out, cyanide and dynamite are really effective ways of killing large numbers of delicious fish.

That’s making it dangerously easy to overfish some of the world’s most popular species.  Take Tuna for example, which accounts for about a billion dollars in trade annually, and has been so overfished that the World Wildlife Fund has listed it as being “Fully Exploited”.  “Fully Exploited” – If we were using that term to talk about children or puppies, you bet everyone in the world would know about it.

(Or they’d be trying to farm raise children and puppies)

The apocalyptic seafood scenario really begins when you realize where all the WMF’s (weapons of mass fishing) are being used.  Remember when we told you how Coral Triangle is one of the most biologically rich parts of the whole planet?  Well that area also happens to be where 60% of all of the world’s seafood is born.  And when dynamite or cyanide is used to kill fish, it’s also killing the coral reefs that all those fish are born in.  Making matters even worse is that about 70% of the fish are being caught before they’ve matured and reproduced.  That’s a bit like egg farmers killing a hen every time it lays an egg – isn’t exactly a recipe for success.

3.)  China Is Eating Its Way Through The Ocean

But like we said, all this unsustainable fishing isn’t happening because people hate fish.  In fact, it’s the opposite: people love fish.  Fish are tasty, exotic, colorful, full of protein, and make much better sushi than other raw meat.

(I’m looking at you, Pork)

The problem is that the market for seafood has gotten so large, and the demand for fish so great that fishermen are willing to risk arrest or dismemberment (remember… dynamite) to pull themselves out of what most of the developed world would think of as abject poverty.  And who are they selling most of that seafood to?  Well the short answer is China.

Now we don’t mean to put the blame for the desperate actions of a few fishers and poachers on China.  After all, it’s not like China created some sort of elaborate national policy to increase their population that spanned several decades and resulted in unprecedented economic growth and off-the-chart national consumption patterns.

(Ok… so that’s exactly what they did)

While we normally associate seafood with island nations like Japan, Chinese cuisine has been using shellfish, squid, puffer fish and others since before the birth of most major religions, which should tell you something about the cultural importance of seafood in China.  And that’s a very big deal when you consider that China has over 1.3 billion people living inside its borders.  To put some perspective to it, if God were to reach down and randomly choose a human being, there’s about a 1 in 5 chance that person would be Chinese.  Now consider that the average Chinese person eats more than 30 pounds of seafood a year (More than double what your average American is eating) and you’ve got a market that is very hard to ignore, especially when you’re a struggling fisherman with an empty stomach and a family to provide for.

4.)  The World is Taking Notice

So, let’s say that you’d like to keep eating seafood without worrying if there’s a fuse hidden in your shrimp cocktail, but you’re not terribly fond of the idea of taking food out of the mouths of fisher folk who make in a year what you make in a week.  Having a stern conversation with China’s 1.35 billion+ population on the merits of sustainable fishing seems like a logistical nightmare, and getting the international community to address a small slice of the ocean seems like a long shot…

(Though we think we know just the man to lead them)

Well actually that last one is more realistic than you might think.  The U.S. Secretary of State announced this summer that the State Department will be starting new programs in Indonesia and the Philippines that use mobile phones to teach coastal communities how to fish without losing their limbs or wiping out thousands of miles of precious reefs.  And the six countries that are inside the Coral Triangle have joined together as part of the appropriately titled Coral Triangle Initiative in an effort to coordinate a response to the steady destruction of their food, economy, and way of life.

International organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, RARE and countless others are hard at work on the ground (in the water?) trying to win hearts and minds, and change local fishing policies.  And the folks at Discovery Channel, BBC, National Geographic and the fearless pioneers at Coral and Oak Studios are working to bring awareness of the Coral Triangle to TV’s, tablets and distracted employees worldwide.

If you want to learn more about sustainable fishing in the Coral Triangle, drop us a line and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter as we document more of our work here.