According to a news release from the University of British Columbia, massive fish traps in the Persian Gulf could be trapping up to six times more fish than what’s being officially documented. This is the first investigation of fish traps from space completed by UBC researchers.

“Global fisheries are overexploited worldwide, yet crucial catch statistics reported to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) by member countries remain unreliable,” wrote the researchers in the study’s abstract. “Recent advances in remote-sensing technology allow us to view fishing practices from space and mitigate gaps in catch reporting.”

Utilizing satellite imagery from Google Earth, researchers guesstimated that there were 1,900 fishing weirs along the coast of the Persian Gulf during 2005 and that they trapped about 31,000 tons of fish. However, the official number relayed by the seven countries in the region to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization was 5,260 tons.

According to UBC researchers, fishing weirs are semi-permanent traps that use tidal variations to their advantage to trap different marine species. Utilized in Southeast Asia, Africa and North America, some weirs are more than 100 meters long.

LiveScience notes that fishing weirs were traditionally constructed with date palm fronds. Nowadays, weirs are typically constructed with bamboo and galvanized mesh wire.

“This ancient fishing technique has been around for thousands of years,” noted lead author Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak, a PhD student with the UBC Fisheries Centre’s Sea Around Us Project, in a statement. “But we haven’t been able to truly grasp their impact on our marine resources until now, with the help of modern technology.”

The research demonstrates the ability of satellite imagery, thanks to Google Earth, to confirm catch numbers and fisheries operations in general.

“These results, which speak to the unreliability of officially reported fisheries statistics, provide the first example of fisheries catch estimates from space, and point to the potential for remote-sensing approaches to validate catch statistics and fisheries operations in general,” the researchers added.

“Time and again we’ve seen that global fisheries catch data don’t add up,” posited co-author Daniel Pauly, principal investigator with the Sea Around Us Project. “Because countries don’t provide reliable information on their fisheries’ catches, we need to expand our thinking and look at other sources of information and new technologies to tell us about what’s happening in our oceans.”

The study’s findings are described in greater detail in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.

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