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Slavery and overfishing on the high seas can’t

hide from these researchers
They’re using old technology in new ways to spot potential abuse
By Justine Calma @justcalma Dec 21, 2020, 3:38pm EST

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Fish are seen after being unloaded from a boat at the port in Songkhla on February 2, 2016. Around 100 people have
been arrested by authorities in a recent crackdown on abuses involving Thailand’s multi-billion dollar seafood industry.
The deep-rooted problem caused the huge global brand, Nestle in 2015 to admit that it had discovered clear evidence
of slavery at sea in parts of the Thai supply chain. | Photo by Paula Bronstein / Getty Images

A tracking system designed to help ships avoid crashing into each other has become an VERGE DEALS
important tool for spotting bad behavior on the high seas. Researchers can now put a
spotlight on corporations that dominate fishing in unregulated international waters where it’s
easier to get away with overfishing. And it’s giving us a better idea of how widespread slave
labor could be on fishing vessels.

Two recently published papers use this

technology, the maritime Automatic THAT ALL MAKES IT EASIER TO
Identification System (AIS), to make high- MAKE COMPANIES ANSWER Here are the best Amazon Echo deals right
seas fishing a little less mysterious. The first
study, published in the journal One Earth on
FOR ANY ABUSES THEY now

December 18th, traces the origins of COMMIT

thousands of high-seas fishing vessels back
to big-time corporations that keep store shelves stocked with seafood. Other researchers
use AIS to reveal telltale markers of forced labor on fishing boats, which were published
today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). That all
makes it easier to make companies answer for any abuses they commit at sea.

The technology, the maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS), has actually been Here are the best AirPods deals you can get
right now
around for about two decades. Basically, vessels carry around a box that sends out radio
signals that anyone else can pick up on. Those radio signals share information about the Ad-supported Hulu is only $2 for college
ship, an identifying number, and other things like its size, course, and speed. That’s students

supposed to help vessels spot each other so they don’t get in each other’s way.
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Satellites can pick up on those radio signals, too, giving researchers a new set of eyes on
the vast high seas — international waters that make up almost two-thirds of the world’s A few deals to get 2021 started off right

oceans. In 2014, Google and environmental nonprofit organizations Oceana and SkyTruth
MORE IN VERGE DEALS
launched Global Fishing Watch, an initiative to track fishing vessels around the world as a
way to potentially prevent and hold vessels accountable for abusive practices. Global
Fishing Watch, which is now its own nonprofit, uses AIS and smaller national vessel tracking
systems to create a near-real time map tracing the movement of about 60,000 commercial
fishing boats.

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That was a game-changer for Jennifer
A GAME-CHANGER Jacquet, an associate professor in New York
University’s Department of Environmental
Studies. She turned to Global Fishing Watch to identify for the first time seafood companies
that own vessels fishing on the high seas. “Just in the course of my project, new technology
enabled the research in a way that wasn’t there when the project began,” Jacquet tells The
Verge. Her team put together a list of the top 10 corporate actors in high-sea fishing in
2018, which includes Dongwon Group, which owns the popular tuna brand StarKist.

“There are few laws and regulations that apply to the high seas, and that is being used by
these companies to do whatever they want,” says Daniel Pauly, an acclaimed marine Processor
A newsletter about computers
biologist who has documented the demise of fish populations around the world. He has
pushed for a complete ban on fishing on the high seas. (Pauly is on the board of directors Email (required)

for Oceana but was not involved in Jacquet’s study.)

Modern-day slavery is another problem on the high seas. Up to 26 percent of 16,000 By signing up, you agree to our Privacy
Notice and European users agree to the data
industrial fishing vessels were likely to use forced labor, the PNAS study published today
transfer policy.
found. As many as 100,000 people are estimated to work on those ships.
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The study authors used AIS data from 2012 to 2018 to study the behavior of vessels that
had already been documented using slavery. That allowed them to see how those ships
behaved differently from other vessels: they stay away from ports and spend a lot more time
on the high seas, for example. The researchers used that information to build a computer
model that can identify vessels showing behaviors that suggest that they might also rely on
forced labor.
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“This research, this paper, it could not have
been done five years ago,” says Gavin “IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN
McDonald, lead author of that study. “There DONE FIVE YEARS AGO.”
would have just been no way to track this
many vessels at a global scale without Global Fishing Watch.”

There’s still a lot of elbow grease that goes into turning the data from AIS into research that
can have an impact on how responsibly the fishing industry operates. Data scientists at
Global Fishing Watch had tried to automate this process in the past, but scraping the
internet couldn’t get the same results. “You end up with one level, but you actually need to
dig deeper,” says Nate Miller, a senior data scientist at Global Fishing Watch who was a co-
author with Jacquet.

Jacquet and Miller’s team for this project did just that. One of their colleagues found that
several high-seas fishing vessels shared the same address, even though they listed
different owners. She searched for the address on Google Maps, zoomed in to see the sign
on the building, and tied all those ships to Pacific Fishing & Supply based in Hawaii. It
fulfilled one of Jacquet’s hopes for this study, which was to identify new players on the high
seas since a lot of the spotlight so far had been on Asia-based companies.

More transparency has already forced some

MORE TRANSPARENCY HAS companies to act. The Walmart Foundation
ALREADY FORCED SOME funded McDonald’s study after a 2015

COMPANIES TO ACT investigation by The Guardian and The

Associated Press revealed that Walmart sold
shrimp tied to slave labor.

If the high seas aren’t so lawless in the future, we may have researchers like these to thank.
Their work could inform a new treaty being negotiated by the United Nations. If it comes to
fruition next year, it could establish protected areas in the high seas to safeguard marine
life.

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