Reporter’s Journal: Bomb Harvest
Porters sort and tally a week’s worth of landings from a bomb fishing crew before carrying the catch to the docks in Makassar, Indonesia. Each plastic basket is worth Rp. 100,000 ($8). The full tally for this boat was Rp. 18,800,000 or $1404. The porters get paid a percentage for shuttling the catch to shore and selling the fish to wholesale distributors in the city. This photo was taken by Mongabay.org’s Special Reporting...
Reporter’s Journal: A Wood & Glass View
Wood and glass goggles used by traditional divers throughout Sulawesi. Though produced near-exclusively by the Bajau sea gypsies, “traditional” goggles are commonly used, regardless of ethnic group, when spear-fishing, cyanide fishing or collecting sea cucumbers, groupers or fish killed with bombs that are detonated underwater. However rubber recreational dive masks are becoming more prevalent. This photo was taken by Mongabay.org’s...
Reporter’s Journal: Times are getting dark
By Mongabay Special Reporting Initiative Fellow Ruxandra Guidi. Photo by Roberto Guerra. This is the season of hurricanes and heavy storms. But the archipelago of Kuna Yala, located south of the hurricane belt, is typically spared the damage and strong winds that hit islands further north in the Caribbean, year after year. In recent years, however, rains have forced the people living in these islands — an estimated 30,000 — to start...
Reporter’s Journal: In Search of Sardines
Community members crowd aboard a slerek purse-seiner in Muncar, East Java, the morning after a successful sardine fishing expedition. University of British Columbia researchers calculated that nearly half the landings in Muncar are distributed to the crew, their relatives, and their neighbors, to eat at home or sell. Though an insurance for protein-rich diets among the local community, the practice means that commercial sardine sales...
Reporter’s Journal: Fishermans’ Wives
Fishermens’ wives negotiate a price for freshly caught sardines in Negara, a town on the shores of the Bali Strait. The strait is about to become Indonesia’s first region to be managed under an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management. This photo was taken by Mongabay.org’s Special Reporting Initiatives fellow Melati Kaye, who is reporting on the state of the fishing industry in...
Reporter’s Journal: from the fish warehouse
A worker packs Leopard Coral Grouper in a warehouse in Makassar, Indonesia. Indonesia is one of the world’s largest suppliers of live reef fish, mostly to East Asian markets. Though selling live reef fish is legal in Indonesia, many of the fish are caught illegally using cyanide. This photo was taken by Mongabay.org’s Special Reporting Initiatives fellow Melati Kaye, who is reporting on the state of the fishing industry in...
BBC World Service: Climate Change and Community Forest Management in Kuna Yala, Panama
Mongabay SRI Fellow Ruxandra Guidi published a seven-minute segment on BBC World Service’s Science in Action program. The piece focuses on the indigenous Kuna of Panama, whose livelihoods and homes are already being affected by sea level rise and climate change, and the ways in which they are adapting to it while trying to preserve their customs and sovereign control of their forests. Listen to the full segment...
Reporter’s Journal: Disappearing Home
By Melati Kaye A boy takes in the sunset on Barang Lompo, one of the Spermonde Islands in Indonesia. The loss of local reef cover from destructive fishing practices and soil runoff from the nearby city of Makassar exposes islands like Barang Lampo to extreme weather. Over the last thirty years, this tiny island, like others in the region, has lost a tenth of its landmass from the erosive force of storm surges and increasingly larger...
Reporter’s Journal: Telling Fiji Time
The expression “Fiji Time” is commonly used among locals and expatriates. From my island experiences, it feels as though I could insert the name of any small island before the word, “time.” But Fiji time seems to also refer to time spent on the obligatory rituals that allows one to enter a village, be accepted, and talk more intimately with the people who belong to it. Aside from navigating the proper customary channels for permission...
Reporter’s Journal: From Panama
By SRI Fellow Ruxandra Guidi Don Jesus was tasked with the logistics for the conference, and Don Feliciano would be taking care of all the meals for more than 25 people. This was no small feat for these two septuagenarian men, who had to do a lot of phone calling and running around in order to try to secure things like ice and a motorboat and a generator. In the end, ice was the only thing they couldn’t get — and that’s because...
Reporter’s Journal: Fighting poachers and Mother Nature
Fijians communities are largely in charge of managing their waterfront. Volunteer fish wardens in the village, appointed by the chief or the Minister, are the only official members of a village who can legally stop poachers. Though they rarely have any equipment to enforce protection of their tabus (swaths of temporarily protected marine areas inside their fishing grounds), they are harder pressed to fight the effects of climate...
Reporter’s Journal: The Lesser Fish
In Fiji’s capital city of Suva, middlemen buy directly from the fishers. The majority of the fish arrive early Saturday morning, indicating many of the reef fish are caught at night while many fish are asleep, making them easy targets for spearfishers. In the past, larger quantities of fresh fish was available daily. Now the sellers make fewer catches stretch across the week. The overwhelming concern about the region’s...
Reporter’s Journal: Dock Boys
By Melati Kaye “Dock boys” take a swim break from sorting and carrying fish at Makassar’s Paotere harbor, where fish caught with hook and line, homemade bombs, and cyanide are brought to port and sold. This photo was taken by SRI fellow Melati Kaye, who is reporting on the State of Indonesian Fisheries.
Reporter’s Journal: The forests of Uganda
In late January through early February I traveled to Uganda as part of the first Mongabay Special Reporting Initiative (SRI) to report on “the next big thing in tropical forest biodiversity conservation.” I’m a world traveler, and I have a special passion for tropical rainforests — having seen them in Australia, the Peruvian Amazon, Asia, and Central America. Africa was my last continent to visit (OK, does...
Reporter’s Journal: a different kind of leopard
By Melati Kaye March is leopard coral grouper season in South Sulawesi’s Spermonde islands. The live fish sell for $30 per kilogram. Dead fish fetch less than a third of that price. Careful hook and line fishermen can sometimes manage to keep their catch alive. But a surer method is to stun the fish with cyanide, an illegal but widespread practice. This photo was taken by Mongabay.org’s Special Reporting Initiatives fellow...
