Mongabay series: Indonesian Fisheries

LAMBANGAN and UWEDIKAN, Indonesia — “At first, I saw some spinefoot fish, about 50 of them. I was smoking out on the water.” It was midday three years ago, says…

SERIWE, Indonesia – Sunardi remembers the sky lit up red with sunset as he checked the bag his wife had prepared: Change of clothes, check. Cigarettes, dinner, check. He examined…

JAKARTA — Officials in Indonesia have released a predictive calendar they hope will give fish farmers in the country’s largest lake a heads-up on water conditions that have previously killed…

"We need to keep this river clean,” says Muhammad Yusuf, a fisheries official from Padang, the capital of the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. “We’ve got to keep people from…

DENPASAR, Indonesia — Hundreds of people in Bali are celebrating a key victory against a multi-billion-dollar land reclamation project that would have destroyed vast swaths of mangroves on the resort…

Millions of fish in floating cages died suddenly this week in Lake Toba, the biggest lake in Indonesia. E. Naibaho, a local aquafarmer, noticed the fish in his floating pens…

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — Fishermen and environmental activists in Indonesia are demanding accountability after a barge spilled 7,000 tonnes of coal off the Sumatra coast, polluting beaches, damaging coral and…

JAKARTA — Suryadi, a cashier at a convenience store in Jakarta, says he prepares some 400 plastic bags every morning for the day’s shoppers. Sometimes he runs out before the…

The launch of an online crowdsourcing database for seagrass hopes to breathe new life into efforts to conserve the underwater flowering plants, which act as both important habitats for marine…

Shark-fishing outfits have for decades been catching dolphins, seals and other sea mammals to use as bait, helping drive some of those species closer to extinction, researchers have found. In…

Much of the fishing that takes place in international waters would be unprofitable without the billions of dollars in subsidies pumped in by governments to sustain the ecologically destructive industry,…

JAKARTA — The owners of ships engaged in illegal fishing in Indonesia could finally face criminal justice under proposed amendments to the country’s fisheries law, as the government seeks to…

Scientists in Indonesia may have found nine stunning new reef fish species in the protected waters off the country’s largely untouched province of West Papua. They collected samples of the…

JAKARTA — Tough measures by Indonesia to protect its fisheries from foreign poaching vessels are proving effective in helping replenish fish stocks, a new study says. Seizing and blowing up…

JAKARTA — An oil spill in Borneo that began over the past weekend has now spread across an area greater than the city of Paris and is heading out to…

UPDATE (Apr. 4, 2018): Pertamina admitted responsibility for the oil spill because its pipes broke and leaked.  JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has launched an investigation into a major oil…

DENPASAR, Indonesia — Tilapia is a mainstay of Balinese cuisine, but hundreds of thousands of the freshwater fish choke to death regularly in the resort island’s largest lake, for reasons…

JAKARTA — Two videos of manta rays and other fish swimming through swaths of garbage off the resort island of Bali earlier this year have highlighted once again the plastic…

AUKI, Indonesia — “We ladies have eyes on our feet,” Susanti Maryen says after a morning spent collecting saltwater clams and snails at a beach in Auki, an islet off…

President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has called on the navy to shoot at foreign ships suspected of extracting natural resources from his country’s exclusive maritime territory. Duterte made the…