The Silent Damage Behind Your Canned Tuna

0:00 Somewhere in the open ocean right now, there is a raft about the size of a small table, drifting on the current. It has a GPS beacon on top and a long tail of netting hanging underneath. Nobody is steering it. And there's a decent chance it's drifting toward one of the places we've set aside to protect. I want to tell you about that raft today because a new study just put out a number on how far these things travel. And the number is genuinely hard to shake. The raft is called a fish aggregating device. In the tuna industry, people say FADs. The idea behind it is simple, almost clever. Fish are drawn to anything floating in the open water.

0:42 Put out a raft, wait, and a whole community shows up underneath it, including tuna. The GPS beacon tells the fleet exactly where the raft is and roughly how much life has gathered below. When it's worth the trip, a boat comes out and scoops the whole thing. Thousands of these are released into the ocean and left to drift. And that's where the trouble starts because a drifting raft goes where the current takes it. The study published in the journal of science advances in June tracked the public data on these devices. Researchers found that they've likely drifted through more than half of the world's marine protected areas by total area.

1:24 Not half of one region, half of the protected ocean worldwide. The team has also counted the times these rafts actually washed up or got stuck and came back with more than 6,000 strandings across 174 protected areas in 53 different countries and territories. So here's the obvious question. A raft drifts into a protected zone. Why does that matter? It matters because a protected area is meant to be the ocean safe room. It's the stretch where you fence off. It's on paper so that coral turtles and fish can recover.

2:04 And these devices don't read the signs. When one washes onto a reef, the netting underneath snags and breaks the coral. When it starts falling apart, it becomes plastic pollution in the exact place where we're trying to keep it clean. And that hanging that keeps fishing even after nobody's watching. It entangles sea turtles and sharks long after any Tuda were ever caught. The study found nearly 500 at risk species living inside the protected areas where these strandings happen and the damage clusters in a few hotspots. The Central Pacific, the Western Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Here's the part that stuck with me though.

2:46 These devices come from large industrial fleets. But when they wash ashore, the cleanup usually lands on small island communities. The people who often see none of the profit from that Tuna end up hauling the equipment right off their beaches. One of the studies co-authors and economists from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, put the core problem plainly. Protected areas are drawn to guard specific places, but drifting gear doesn't recognize those boundaries. Now, I don't want to leave you sitting in the bad news because there's real movement here. The industry has started to change. Some fleets are switching to devices that are less harmful and more biodegradable so that a lost raft breaks down instead of choking a reef more for years.

3:31 That's genuine progress. But the researchers are clear that it isn't enough on its own. They're calling for three things. Stronger rules on how these devices get used, better tracking so a lost raft can be traced back to whoever put it in the water and real systems to go out and retrieve them before they turn into debris. That's the policy side and that matters. But you probably can't pass fishing regulation this afternoon. It's not going to happen anytime soon. So let me give you the lever you actually have. This whole problem traces back to one style of tuna fishing. The drifting device method and you weigh in on that every time you buy a can of tuna.

4:12 Next time you're at the store, flip the can over and look for two phrases. Pull in line caught or FAD free. That's tuna caught without these rafts. If the can doesn't say it, that's usually your answer. It takes about 10 seconds to look. And if you want to check a specific brand, a free seafood guide like seafood will rate it for you in about the same amount of time. You're not going to clean a reef halfway across the world from your kitchen. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but demand is the reason these devices are in the water in the first place. Choose the tuna caught the harder, cleaner way and chip away at the reason to drift another raft into a protected zone.

4:53 Because in the end, a protected area only protects what stays inside the lines. When the harm drifts in on its own protection needs help from the outside. Sometimes that help is better rules and better tracking and sometimes just a better choice made quietly at the shelf. That's it for today's episode on this episode of how to protect the ocean podcast. Trying something new, trying more of a little bit of a story base and less kind of functional and less robotic. But I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it got what you wanted. I'd love to hear your feedback on it. You can hit me up. DM me on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook, if you'd like. You can also support the show by going to speak up for blue.com forward slash Patreon that speak up for blue.com forward slash.

5:37 I want to thank you for listening to this episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.