- The high seas are the Wild West of the world's oceans.
Pretty much everything 200 or more miles off shore
belongs to no single country.
Corporations profit off fishing these waters
with freedom and anonymity.
Over fishing and other damage is rampant
but almost impossible to track.
But thanks to some old tools and new tricks,
we're finally starting to see
who's doing what, way out there.
- The fact that we didn't know who they were was shocking.
A lot of bad behavior can happen on the high seas.
- That's Gabrielle Carmine, a PhD student
in Marine science and conservation at Duke University.
Her work focuses on protecting the high seas.
- An assessment of 48 different high seas fish stocks
show that three quarters of them
were considered depleted or over-fished.
- Back in 2018, Gabrielle was working for Jennifer Jacquet,
a researcher at New York University.
Jennifer coauthored a study in 2018
showing that global seafood production
actually relies very little on the high seas.
Most of the seafood source there
ends up in high-end luxury markets.
Think of premium fish,
like Chilean sea bass and bluefin tuna.
Basically the high seas are being over-fished
to feed the world's rich.
The big question hanging over
Jennifer and Gabrielle was,
who's responsible for what's happening out there?
Countries might set their own rules,
but nearly two thirds of the world's oceans
lie outside of their jurisdictions.
- We've been thinking about it so much
in terms of is Thailand doing the right thing,
is the US doing the right thing?
And now it's time to ask is Don Juan doing the right thing?
Is StarKist doing the right thing?
And we're offering more evidence in that direction.
- The first step to look for potential over fishing
is to track the boats operating on the high seas.
Luckily, this has gotten a lot easier
thanks to a new hack for old maritime tech.
Most large vessels carry a little box that connects them
to the Automatic Identification System or AIS.
It's a sort of air traffic control for boats.
Each box sends out a radio signal with information
about the ship like its ID number, size, course, and speed.
It helps ships avoid colliding with one another,
and it allows for some tracking from shore.
AIS boxes have a horizontal range of about 74 kilometers
but the signals happen to travel upward much further,
putting them within reach of satellites.
Suddenly AIS was a worldwide maritime surveillance network.
It was a boon for national security interests
but environmental groups saw the potential too.
And in 2014 a couple of them partnered
with Google to create Global Fishing Watch.
- It was so different.
A whole new way of looking at who was out there.
- [Justine] Global fishing Watch uses AIS data to track
about 60,000 commercial fishing boats in nearly real time.
And by following those vessels,
Jennifer and Gabrielle started to see patterns of behavior.
- And what we found indeed is that there are vessels
that are almost exclusively high seas.
And that sort of surprised me.
And these may be the ones
that we should be most worried about.
- But building a list of vessels was just step one.
Step two was actually tying the boats
to the companies who hired them, and profit from them.
- I channeled my inner investigative journalist
in a lot of ways.
Sort of looking at, okay,
we have these vessels, we have the name,
we have the call sign,
we have all these identifiers of the vessel.
And then we had an owner attached to that vessel.
But often what we found is the owner
on these vessel registries
aren't the actual corporate actor.
And connecting an owner to a corporate actor
was sort of looking to see, okay this is a shell company,
this is not a real company.
And then if we found who the parent company was,
that was when we looked into,
okay, does that parent company have a parent company?
Are there sister companies?
Are there subsidiaries?
You're looking for little puzzle pieces
throughout this entire process.
- The process was grueling, but they got results.
Gabrielle, Jennifer, and their team
recently published a list of the top 10 most active
corporate actors in high seas fishing in 2018.
The list includes Dongwon Group
which owns the popular tuna brand StarKist.
In total, they were able to link about two thirds
of all high seas fishing vessels to their parent companies.
They also identified players in the game
that had previously escaped scrutiny,
like a company apparently
called Pacific Fishing & Supply Inc in Hawaii.
- Pacific Fishing & Supply,
that actually, it took me a really long time
to sort of figure out who they were.
I saw this one address keep coming up,
and I saw that they were all these Hawaiian longline fleets.
There were a bunch of different owners
and I was sort of grasping at straws
with these like 20 or so different owners
and they all had company names.
So I found all the companies that had
this addressed attached to that company.
And I put that address into Google Maps
and I spent probably a day or so just in street view,
just walking the street around the block
of this one company,
and just examining what the signage looked like.
And then realizing that they really are all one company,
Pacific Fishing & Supply.
- Showing up on this top 10 list
doesn't actually prove much on its own.
We don't know whether the boats in question
actually over fished, or committed other abuses.
We only know that they were spending
lots of time where over fishing occurs.
Plus there are vessels that don't carry AIS,
or that turn them off when they don't wanna be seen.
And there were plenty of boats with parent companies
Gabrielle couldn't track down.
But work like this could lead
to more accountability for companies.
Other researchers have used global fishing watch
to track modern day slavery on industrial fishing vessels.
They found telltale signs of forced labor in the data,
like boats spending more time on the high seas,
and traveling further away from ports.
These studies could influence negotiations
happening this year for a new treaty
to protect the high seas.
And treaty or no, they could force companies
to answer tough questions from shareholders and consumers.
In short, their shield of anonymity is slowly cracking.
- I think the research that we've done is very objective
but the question of what you do with it,
how you leverage it, is where you know,
your social values kick in
what do we want to do with it?
It's not just my decision.
It's yours as well as citizens of this world.
How do we wanna mobilize this knowledge
and make a difference with it?
- Thank you to Lexus for their support.
Be sure to check out the new 2021 Lexus IS
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which is why they sponsored this series
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They don't influence our editorial,
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So thanks again to them, and thank you for watching.