Today, that investigation moves deep inland to a thousand or so fish farms in the most landlocked region on earth in China’s Xinjiang region. We start by looking at the country’s largest producer of farmed salmon, a supplier of American military bases, public schools and US Congress. Read: The Tianyun Report.

This month, we are releasing 4 new murals by artists from Indonesia, Uruguay, and the Philippines. For each artist, we made a short video showing their process and inspiration.

Alelia Ariola is a self-taught painter who was born in Silang, Cavite, Philippines where she founded the Girl Gang of Art Ph — a vibrant community dedicated to celebrating and empowering women through creative expression. “Participating in the Mural Project shifted my perspective completely. I used to see the ocean as something distant, a place for marine life, or a temporary escape where people go to rest and unwind. But the more I learned, the more I realized how deeply connected the ocean is to human lives.” Gain deeper insight into the inspiration and artistry behind Alelia Ariola’s mural for the Outlaw Ocean clicking here.

Elle Wibisono is a fisheries scientist, but believes science only matters if it reaches people — and that comics, illustration, and storytelling can carry scientific ideas further than a paper ever could. Elle is the creator of Fishtory, a comics platform using art to convey fisheries science, and author of A Snapper Tale, an illustrated children’s book about the deep-water snappers she once studied. “The Outlaw Ocean Mural Project allowed me to illustrate the complexity of the seafood supply chain. My hope is to motivate passersby to ask questions like: Where does our fish actually come from? In turn, the mural may spark a larger conversation that leads to change.” Watch how her piece for The Outlaw Ocean Mural Project came to life here.

Gerilya is an artist collective formed in 2008 while all members attended the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Gerilya ventures into comics, street art, graffiti, animation and art exhibitions. They classify their works as falling into three main categories: political, socio-cultural, and historical. “We evoke the myths and legends of our ancestors, depicting the story of Maguayen, the sea goddess who protects fishermen and all sea creatures. Thanks to The Outlaw Ocean Project, we were able to seize the opportunity to convey the importance of the ocean and those who depend on it for survival.” Learn about their inspiration for The Outlaw Ocean Mural Project clicking here.

MIN8 has been one of the leading figures in urban art in Uruguay since she began her artistic journey in 1998. “The mural focuses on sea turtles and one of the primary causes of injury, sometimes even death, among these animals is plastic littering the sea. Almost as if a dark metaphor, we are painting on a surface made of recycled plastic, the very material that kills them. Perhaps, the mural will inspire the community to recycle and pay closer attention to the overuse of plastic.” Follow MIN8’s process working on the mural for the Outlaw Ocean here.

Every few months, new murals are added to The Outlaw Ocean Mural Project website. Head over to see how artists around the world are bringing these ocean stories to the streets: www.theoutlawoceanmuralproject.com

See the trailer now:

This experiment is our attempt to find a new way to chronicle a place that has always felt too vast, too distant, and, at times, too strange to be captured through traditional story-telling. Based on investigations by Ian Urbina, the film takes you through a gritty realm of sea slaves, oil dumpers, vigilante conservationists, whalers, poachers, mercenaries and stowaways — alongside a journalist trying to figure out how to render it all with emotional accuracy.

Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean will premiere at WildScreen Festival, often called the Sundance of environmental filmmaking, in October 2026, where it has been nominated for the Independent Award and the Impact Award. Following its premiere, the film will tour the international film festival circuit — likely coming to a festival near you — before its official worldwide release, when it will be made available for all to see.

To learn more about the film, go to: www.theoutlawocean.com/Rhapsody-Trailer

It involves training and learning from the ocean investigators of tomorrow and usually in places far from where our staff reside but close to where our stories live.

Here is a video that talks about a small set of our most recent collaborators.

You can watch the testimony we gave here:

In the hearing, I shared some preliminary findings from our upcoming “Food for Feed” investigation, which examines the global fishmeal and aquaculture industries and reveals various labor and environmental abuses within supply chain of the global aquaculture industry. The investigation was conducted by a team of more than two dozen reporters from as many countries as we looked at roughly 1,400 fishmeal plants worldwide. We inspected vessels supplying these plants, traced the feed’s destination, and tracked where the seafood ends up.

The hearing focused on the China portion of our findings: 1200 fish farms in Xinjiang and Tibet, an area representing the fastest-growing segment of China’s fish farming industry. We also discussed the fact that seafood from fish farms in Xinjiang is being exported to the US in violation of federal law. Furthermore, the US-based firm, BAP, has in some cases, certified these farms, despite the ban on any products tied to this region.

The full hearing is here.

In February 2023, Donggang Jinhui Foodstuff, a seafood-processing company in China, threw a party. It had been a successful year: a new plant had opened, and the company had doubled the amount of squid that it exported to the United States. The party, according to videos posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, featured singers, instrumentalists, dancers, fireworks, and strobe lights. 

One aspect of the company’s success seems to have been its use of North Korean workers, who are sent by their government to work in Chinese factories, in conditions of captivity, to earn money for the state. A seafood trader who does business with Jinhui recently estimated that it employed between fifty and seventy North Koreans. When videos of the party were posted online, a commenter asked, “Aren’t you prohibited from filming this?”

The video was part of hundreds of hours of footage and other documents that proved that the Chinese government was using North Korean workers to process seafood, in violation of UN sanctions. Much of the seafood processed in these plants was destined for consumers in the U.S., which breaks federal law. 

These revelations, which are part of the final episode of the newly released second season of the Outlaw Ocean podcast, sent shockwaves through the global seafood market as companies scrambled to discern whether their supply chains were compromised by a similar dependence on state-sponsored forced labor. At the risk of espionage charges and execution, two dozen North Korean workers, most of them women, also agreed to talk to the reporters about working in Chinese seafood plants. These workers recounted rampant sexual assault, violence, constant monitoring and zero access to the outside world. The podcast is available on all major streaming platforms. For transcripts, background reporting, and bonus content, visit the Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season Two. All the episodes are out now.

Global attention on the illegal use of North Korean labor has spiked recently because of Russia’s deployment of thousands of soldiers from the Hermit Kingdom to fight in the war in Ukraine. The US state department has estimated that there are over 100,000 North Korean workers currently in China. 

China officially denies that North Korean workers are in the country, but the investigation identified at least fifteen seafood processing plants that, collectively, have employed more than a thousand North Korean workers since 2017. Investigators dispatched to seafood plants in China filmed North Koreans processing seafood. After mining social media for footage of North Korean workers in Chinese seafood processing plants, investigators then used export data to tie those plants to Western buyers. 

Some of the social media footage pulled from China featured people openly discussing the presence of these workers. “They are easy to distinguish,” a Dandong native wrote in a comment on Bilibili, a video-sharing site. “They all wear uniform clothes, have a leader, and follow orders.” In a video at a plant called Dandong Yuanyi Refined Seafoods, fifteen women perform a synchronized dance in front of a mural commemorating “Youth Day,” a North Korean holiday. The video features a North Korean flag and the caption, “North Korea in Donggang cold storage [with] little beautiful women.” (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) 

The impact of the investigation was deep and wide. Several seafood companies severed ties with plants connected to the North Korean workers. The Congressional and Executive Committee on China held a hearing where they called for the governments of South Korea, Japan and the U.S. to work together to stop seafood products processed in China by forced North Korean labor from being imported. Members of the European Parliament sent letters to the European Commission questioning about imports of seafood tainted by state-sponsored forced labor.

On a cloudy morning in April 2023, more than eighty men and women, dressed in matching red windbreakers, stood in orderly lines in front of the train station in Xinjiang, a landlocked and subjugated region in China's far west. The people were Uyghurs, one of China’s largest ethnic minorities. They stood, with suitcases at their feet, watching a farewell ceremony held in their honor by the local government. A video of the event shows a woman wearing in traditional dress pirouetting on a stage. A banner reads, “Promote mass employment and build societal harmony.” At the end of the video, drone footage pans back to show trains waiting to take the Uyghurs away.

The event was part of a vast labor-transfer program run by the Chinese state, which forcibly sends Uyghurs to work in industries across the country. The goal of the program is partially to subjugate a historically restive people. Uyghur separatists revolted throughout the 1990s and bombed police stations in 2008 and 2014. China began the labour transfers in the early 2000s as part of a broad system of persecution that has also included mass arrests and the use of “re-education” camps, where Uyghurs have been subjected to torture, beatings, and forced sterilization. Researchers described China’s actions against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims as a form of genocide.

Many of the transferred workers are involved in processing seafood that is then exported to more than twenty countries, including the U.S., Canada, and several in the E.U., according to an investigation published as episode 8 of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast’s second season. The podcast is available on all major streaming platforms. For transcripts, background reporting, and bonus content, visit the Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season Two. New episodes are released weekly.

These disclosures of China’s use of state-sponsored forced labor in seafood production come as the trade war between the US and China has heightened tensions between the countries and directed new attention to the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act. This is an American law that prohibits the import of goods produced in Xinjiang and a cudgel that the Trump administration is likely to apply more aggressively as he ramps up pressure on Beijing.

On November 19, 2024, the European Union approved its Forced Labor Regulation, which prohibits “products made using forced labor” from entering member countries. This new regulation will likely intensify the urgency for companies and market players like the U.S. and Europe to know whether imports coming into those countries are tied to forced labor such as those identified by this investigation.

A review of internal company newsletters, local news reports, trade data, and satellite imagery revealed that ten large seafood companies in the eastern province of Shandong, China’s most important fishing and seafood processing hub, have received at least a thousand Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities from forced labor transfer programs out of Xinjiang since 2018.

Sometimes transfers were motivated by labor demands. In March 2020, for example, the Chishan Group, one of China’s largest seafood catching and processing companies, published an internal newsletter describing what it called the “huge production pressure” caused by the pandemic. That October, party officials from the local anti-terrorist detachment of China’s public security bureau and the country’s human resources and social security bureau, which handles work transfers, met twice with executives to discuss how to find the company additional labour, according to company newsletters.

Soon after, Chishan agreed to accelerate transfers to their plants. Wang Shanqiang, the deputy general manager at Chishan, said in a corporate newsletter, “The company looks forward to the migrant workers from Xinjiang arriving soon.” The Chishan Group did not respond to requests for comment.

The Chishan Group was not unique. Many seafood companies were tied to a wide variety of similar problems with forced labor. The pervasiveness of these problems is why the global seafood industry likely will have to assess how it monitors its supply chains, particularly when these supply chains route through China.

To detect forced labour, companies tend to rely on private firms that conduct “social audits,” in which inspectors visit factories to make sure they comply with international labour standards. But social audits are typically announced in advance, which allows managers to hide minority workers during inspections. Even when workers are interviewed, they are often reluctant to be candid, for fear of retribution.

In May, 2022, social auditors from SGS, one of the top auditing firms, toured the Haibo seafood processing factory, in Shandong, and found no evidence of forced labour. But a team of investigative reporters found that more than 170 people from Xinjiang worked at Haibo in 2021, and a half-dozen Uyghur workers posted regularly to social media from Haibo throughout 2022. On the same day the auditors toured, a young Uyghur worker posted pictures of herself near the plant’s dormitories and loading bays.

This was not an isolated incident. During the investigation, reporters found other examples of Uyghurs who had posted pictures of themselves at factories within days of those plants being cleared by social audits. They also found that half of the Chinese exporters they had identified as being tied to Uyghur labour had passed audits by leading global inspection firms.

Daniel Aritonang graduated from high school in May, 2018, hoping to find a job. Short and lithe, he lived in the coastal village of Batu Lungun, Indonesia, where his father owned an auto shop. Aritonang spent his free time rebuilding engines in the shop, occasionally sneaking away to drag race his blue Yamaha motorcycle on the village’s backroads. 

Like thousands of other Indonesians, Aritonang answered an advertisement to work aboard a Chinese fishing ship, traveling the world, combing the high seas. Eighteen months later, he was dead, his body dropped off, beaten and bloated on a dock in Montevideo, Uruguay. The mysterious death was hardly unusual: for the previous 5 years that same port saw one dead body per month dropped off, mostly from Chinese fishing ships, which have, the world over, a reputation as the most brutal. 

When Aritonang climbed onto his assigned squid ship, called the Zhen Fa 7, he joined what may be the largest maritime operation the world has ever known. In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships. (The U.S. and the E.U., by contrast, have fewer than three hundred distant-water fishing vessels each.) Some ships that appear to be fishing vessels press territorial claims in contested waters, including in the South China Sea and around Taiwan. “This may look like a fishing fleet, but, in certain places, it’s also serving military purposes,” Ian Ralby, who runs I.R. Consilium, a maritime-security firm, said. 

But China’s preëminence at sea has come at a cost. The country is largely unresponsive to international laws, and its fleet is the worst perpetrator of illegal fishing in the world, helping drive species to the brink of extinction. Its ships are also rife with labor trafficking, debt bondage, violence, criminal neglect, and death. “The human-rights abuses on these ships are happening on an industrial and global scale,” Steve Trent, the C.E.O. of the Environmental Justice Foundation, said.

The investigation into Aritonang's death is part of Season 2 of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast, which derives from 4 years of reporting, mostly at sea. A team of reporters traversed a half dozen countries and crossed thousands of miles of ocean, while boarding Chinese squid jiggers to talk to workers in this otherwise invisible industry. As the trade war between the US and China has escalated in recent months, the interconnectedness of these two massive economies has become more obvious than ever with tariffs and counter-tariffs spiking prices. But nowhere is China's economic and political power more pronounced than at sea and this, at times, has dire consequences for workers and the environment. The podcast is available on all major streaming platforms. For transcripts, background reporting, and bonus content, visit the Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season Two. New episodes are released weekly.

Before taking the job on the Chinese ship, Aritonang had struggled to find work. The rate of unemployment in his native Indonesia was high: more than 5.5 percent nationally, and more than 16 per cent for youth. Climate change has made matters worse; many of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands are sinking. Aritonang’s home is roughly 100 yards from the Indian Ocean. His village is losing coast from sea level rise at an average of between 10 and 15 yards a year. When Hengki Anhar, a local friend, suggested the two of them go abroad together on a fishing boat, Aritonang agreed. Friends and family were surprised by his decision, because the demands of the job were so high and the pay so low. But a job was a job, and both he and Anhar desperately needed work.

In 2019, Aritonang and Anhar contacted a “manning” agency based in Central Java. In the maritime world, manning agencies recruit and supply workers to fishing ships. They handle everything, including paycheques, work contracts, plane tickets, port fees and visas. They are poorly regulated, frequently abusive and have been connected to human trafficking. Following the agency’s instructions, Aritonang and Anhar went to the city of Tegal. They took medical exams and handed over their passports and bank documents. For the next two months, they waited to hear if they had been hired. Money ran short. Through Facebook messenger, Aritonang wrote to his friend Firmandes Nugraha, asking for help paying for food. Nugraha urged him to return home. “You don’t even know how to swim,” Nugraha reminded him.

Eventually assignments came through, and, in September 2019, Aritonang appeared in a Facebook photo with other Indonesians waiting in Busan, South Korea, to board their fishing vessels. “Just a bunch of not-high-ranking people who want to be successful by having a bright future,” Aritonang said on Facebook. Aritonang and Anhar boarded the Zhen Fa 7, which set sail across the Pacific. The ship’s crew numbered 30 men: 20 from China, and the remaining 10 from Indonesia. The vessel would spend the next months chasing squid in international waters off the coast of South America.

In December, 2020, the Zhen Fa 7 left the vicinity of the Galapagos Islands, sailed around the southern tip of South America, through the Strait of Magellan, and made its way north to an immensely productive high-seas squid fishery known as the Blue Hole, about 360 miles above the Falkland Islands. The bounty was plentiful there, and the captain began working his crew around the clock. A month later, Aritonang fell severely ill. In all likelihood he was suffering from a disease called beriberi, caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1, also known as thiamine. Sometimes called “rice disease,” and often an indication of conditions of captivity, beriberi has historically broken out on ships and in prisons, asylums and migrant camps—anywhere diets have consisted mainly of white rice or wheat flour, both very poor sources of thiamine. On board the Zhen Fa 7 the captain issued each Indonesian two boxes of Supermi instant noodles per week for free. The costs for any additional snacks, coffee, alcohol or cigarettes were deducted from their salaries. The Indonesians were paid US$250 per month, along with a US$20 bonus per ton of squid caught.

The Indonesians on board begged the captain to get Aritonang onshore medical attention, but the captain refused. Later, when asked to explain the captain’s refusal, Anhar, Aritonang’s friend and crewmate, said, “There was still a lot of squid. We were in the middle of an operation.” By February 2021, Aritonang could no longer stand. He moaned in pain, slipping in and out of consciousness. Incensed, the Indonesian crew threatened to strike and the captain finally acquiesced. On March 2, Aritonang was transferred to a nearby fuel tanker called the Marlin, whose crew six days later dropped him off in Montevideo. By then it was too late. For several hours, emergency room doctors struggled to keep him alive, while Jesica Reyes, a local interpreter who had been summoned to speak to Aritonang in Bahasa, Indonesia’s official language, waited anxiously in the hall. Eventually the doctors emerged from the emergency room to tell her that he had died.

In an e-mail, the Zhen Fa 7’s owner, Rongcheng Wangdao Ocean Aquatic Products Co. Ltd. declined to comment on Aritonang’s death but said that it had found no evidence of complaints from the crew about their living or working conditions on the vessel. The company added that it had handed the matter over to the China Overseas Fisheries Association, which regulates the industry. Questions submitted to that agency by the Outlaw Ocean Project went unanswered. 

In the months after the investigation was published by hundreds of news outlets, hearings were held in the Canadian parliament, at the EU commission, and in the US Congress to voice outrage at the wider pattern of illegal fishing and worker abuse revealed in China's fishing fleet and in the plants that processed its catch. And in May, 2025, authorities with the US Customs and Border Protection announced that due to forced labor revealed on the Zhen Fa 7,  the agency was banning the import of any seafood tied to this vessel.

On October 29 2023, a 45-year-old American named Joshua Farinella flew into the city of Amalapuram near India’s eastern coast to start his new job as the general manager at a shrimp processing plant owned by a company called Choice Canning. Farinella, who is softly spoken with a shaved head, neatly trimmed beard and full sleeve of tattoos, was excited about the prospect of living abroad for the first time. 

True, this would be a high-pressure job, and he would miss Christa, his wife, but he had negotiated a salary of $300,000 a year, more than double what he’d earned at another seafood company in the United States. He joked that he was now the best paid shrimp worker who did not own his own company. He figured that if he could stick it out for two or three years he would be set up for life: he looked forward to upgrading his camper van, paying off his car loan and setting aside some money for his stepdaughter’s university education.

Farinella’s dream quickly turned into a nightmare. He soon discovered that the plant’s largely female employees were effectively trapped on the compound, routinely underpaid, and forced to live in inhumane, unsanitary conditions. The managers were also misleading auditors and processing shrimp with banned antibiotics. It soon dawned on him that he’d been hired as an American face to “whitewash” a forced-labor factory. Over several months, Farinella meticulously gathered evidence that he brought to the Outlaw Ocean team. The results of that investigation are the subject of the fifth episode of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2. The podcast is available on all major streaming platforms. For transcripts, background reporting, and bonus content, visit the Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season Two. New episodes are released weekly.

Listen to the Outlaw Ocean Podcast

In recent years, India has exploded as the dominant source of shrimp for much of the world, with support from its government through subsidies and loosened foreign investment restrictions. In 2021, India exported more than $5 billion of shrimp globally and was responsible for nearly a quarter of the world’s shrimp exports. Choice Canning is one of the largest Indian suppliers in the market, with corporate offices in two big Indian cities, Kochi and Chennai, as well as in Jersey City, N.J.

Choice Canning categorically denied Farinella’s claims and said that the company never underpaid workers, prevented them from leaving without permission, or maintained subpar living conditions. 

On any given day, there might be more than 650 workers at the plant, typically hired by third-party contractors. Hundreds of the workers lived locally in Andhra Pradesh and went home at the end of each day. The rest were migrant workers recruited from impoverished corners of the country who lived at the plant. A security guard was usually posted outside near the building’s front door. Soon, Farinella found migrant workers living on the compound in deplorable conditions — like shared beds with bedbug-infested mattresses — as well as downright dangerous conditions, like a secret dorm above the plants’ ammonia compressors. He also realized there are hundreds more people living on site than the paperwork accounts for, and they cannot freely leave.

At 3 a.m. on November 11, 2023, a manager sent Farinella a WhatsApp message informing him that a woman had been found running through the plant’s water treatment facility. “She was searching for a way out of here,” the manager wrote. “Her contractor is not allowing her to go home.” The woman made it as far as the main gate but was turned back by guards.

Forbidding workers to leave their plants when they choose to is a violation of the Indian constitution and also likely violates the country’s penal code, according to the Corporate Accountability Lab, an advocacy and research group. When Farinella arrived at the plant several hours later, he tried to get an answer about what had been going on—and was told by an HR manager that it had all been a misunderstanding. The woman had not wanted to leave after all. An alarm bell went off in Farinella’s mind. 

On January 3, 2024, news outlets in India reported that a group of about 70 workers, many of them women, marched to a police station in the Andhra Pradesh province to demand that action be taken against a labor contractor at their workplace, the nearby Choice Canning shrimp factory. 

The workers alleged that the plant’s labor contractor stole approximately $2,600 in wages, equivalent to about two years of an average worker's salary. They also demanded a manager be charged for abusive language under Indian legislation that seeks to prevent hate crimes against members of underprivileged castes - many of the workers were from India’s lowest caste, called Dalits or “untouchables.” Local media reported Choice Canning had properly paid the contractor, who then withheld payment. Following police intervention, the contractor repaid roughly $1,600 to the group.

Farinella was concerned when he found workers sleeping on the floor, but he said he and others struggled to get authorization for the necessary changes. A few weeks later he discovered during a recorded conversation with two labor contractors for Choice Canning that 150 workers had not had a day off in a year.  It was also hard, he said, to tell how long employees spent working. A human-resources executive admitted candidly in a Zoom meeting recorded by Farinella how she would need to adjust attendance records and timecards for an audit.

Processing seafood is a race against the clock to prevent spoilage, so the Choice Canning plant in Amalapuram runs more or less 24/7. There’s also not a lot of automation in shrimp processing, so this means that the factory relies on an enormous amount of labour to deliver 40 shipping containers full of packaged shrimp — every single day. 

The story about conditions at the shrimp plant in India come against a broader backdrop. The same week that the whistleblower documents were published, the Corporate Accountability Lab, which is an advocacy group of lawyers and researchers, released a report detailing severe cases of captive and forced labor as well as environmental concerns often tied to wastewater at a variety of other shrimp plants in India.

After leaving his job at Choice Canning, Farinella returned to the U.S. and filed whistleblower complaints to several federal agencies. These complaints also allege a variety of food safety violations, including that the company knowingly and illegally exported shrimp that had tested positive for antibiotics to major American brands in violation of federal law.

In Greece, Max Hardberger posed as an interested buyer, in Haiti as a port official, in Trinidad, a shipper. He has plied guards with booze and distracted them with prostitutes; spooked port police officers with witch doctors and duped night watchmen into leaving their posts. His goal: to get on board a vessel he was trying to retrieve and race toward the 12-mile line where the high seas begin and local jurisdiction ends.

Hardberger runs a rare kind of repo service, extracting huge ships from foreign ports. His company is a last resort for ship owners whose vessels have been seized, often by bad actors, and over the years he’s built a reputation for taking the kinds of jobs others turn down. Hardberger’s specialty is infiltrating hostile territory and taking control of ships in whatever way he can – usually through subterfuge and stealth. Whatever part of the world his missions take him, Hardberger thrives in its grey areas. 

He handles the toughest of grab-and-dash jobs in foreign harbors, usually on behalf of banks, insurers or shipowners. A last-resort solution to a common predicament, he is called when a vessel has been stolen, its operators have defaulted on their mortgage or a ship has been fraudulently detained by local officials.

The public perception of modern piracy usually involves Somalis in fast-boats capturing tankers on the high seas. Of late, the Houthis launching from Yemen have revived global concern about attacks on merchant vessels and the global importance of maritime commerce since more than 90 percent of all products reach consumers by way of ships.

But the more common though overlooked threat at sea is white-collar piracy: schemes where ships get held captive in port through bureaucratic or administrative means. The pirates are actually different groups of mortgage lenders, lawyers, ship owners, or shipping companies, and they might be sitting in an office a half a world away from the ship. 

And sometimes when the ships are caught up in this kind of piracy, a repo man gets the call. This type of offshore crime and the role of maritime repo men is the subject of the fourth episode of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2, during which a reporting team trailed Hardberger on an especially tough mission in Greece. The podcast is available on all major streaming platforms. For transcripts, background reporting, and bonus content, visit the Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season Two. New episodes are released weekly.

Port scams are as old as shipping itself and seasoned repo men can identify them by name. “Unexpected complications”: a shipyard makes repairs without permission, then sends the owner an astronomical bill, often for more than the value of the ship, hoping to force its forfeiture. “Barratry”: buying off crews, sometimes paying more than a year’s wages to leave a ship’s keys and walk away. “A docking play”: a shipowner defaults on his mortgage, but is in cahoots with a marina, which charges the repossessor hyperinflated docking fees. Consumers are affected by the theft and corruption because it adds millions of dollars to transport costs and insurance rates, raising sticker prices more than 10 percent, maritime researchers say.

Tens of thousands of boats or ships are stolen around the world each year and are difficult to find on the vast oceans, the search is too expensive and the ships often end up in ports with uncooperative or corrupt officials. But when the boat or ship is more valuable, “repo men” like Hardberger are hired to find it. 

Most recoveries of stolen boats and maritime repossessions involve paperwork and banks and working with local law enforcement. But when negotiations fail, waterborne jailbreaks sometimes occur.

The moment that catapulted Hardberger into the spotlight came in 2004, when he took on an assignment in Haiti. The Maya Express case involved a ship whose mortgagee, seeking to reclaim owed funds, was unaware of its whereabouts. Turning to Hardberger and his team, they were tasked with tracking down the vessel. 

They found the Maya Express in Miraguan, Haiti, a small port village, and learned that a judicial auction was set to take place in just two days, threatening to complicate the repossession by auctioning off the vessel. “We had to do something in two days. We could not wait,” Hardberger told the Outlaw Ocean Project. 

So, accompanied by two armed SWAT agents, Hardberger approached the men guarding the Maya Express and offered $300 each for them to leave. With the guards out of the way, Hardberger and his team hitched the vessel to a tugboat and began the delicate task of cutting the anchor chains. “Unfortunately it was a full moon and not a cloud in the sky. The entire bay was lit up so people came running down from the hills to see what was going on,” Hardberger recalls.

Whenever onlookers came near the ship, the two armed men kept them on the dock and did not let anybody leave until the anchor chain was fully cut. Once the ship was free, the tugboat pulled the Maya Express into international waters and eventually toward the Bahamas. “It was the worst possible condition for an extraction but we managed to get it out,” Hardberger reflects.

All of the repo men The Outlaw Ocean Project talked to said they abide by certain self-imposed rules. No violence — better, they said, to hire street youths for lookouts, bar owners for diversions, and prostitutes to talk their way on board to spy. To talk his way on board, Mr. Hardberger said he has a collection of fake uniforms and official-sounding business cards, among them are “Port Inspector,” “Marine Surveyor” and “Internal Auditor.” He also carries a glass vial of magnetic powder to sprinkle on the hull to reveal lettering that has been welded off. Officials from the Haitian Coast Guard, Interpol, and the bar association in California, where Mr. Hardberger is licensed, said they had no records of complaints, disciplinary actions or arrest warrants for him.

The first three episodes of Season 2 of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast are now available, and we’re pleased to once again be working with CBC.

In these episodes, my team and I traveled to Libya to investigate the grim reality faced by migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.

In the third episode, released yesterday, this reporting effort takes an especially dark turn:

My team and I are kidnapped by a Libyan militia. I am severely beaten. All of us are taken at gunpoint to a secret prison at the militia's base. What happens over the subsequent week is brutal. And yet, it pales in comparison to what typical migrants face when they are similarly disappeared.

Now is an especially opportune moment to be releasing this episode. My team and I are still alive today partly thanks to the lottery of birth and the privileges we enjoy because we had European and US passports. Special thanks go to USAID and Dept of State and negotiations orchestrated by Samantha Power for getting us rescued. But this episode is even more timely in light of the current and far worse dangers that journalists are presently facing in Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti, Sudan and elsewhere.

You can listen to the episodes by clicking here:

THE OUTLAW OCEAN PODCAST

Every Wednesday, we’ll push out a new episode detailing a variety of issues and colorful characters. This immersive audio documentary series brings together more than eight years of reporting at sea on all seven oceans and more than three dozen countries. The next episodes will incorporate more of our recent reporting on the Whistleblower story and the China seafood industry.

On February 4, 2021, roughly 70 miles north of Libya, a reconnaissance plane with a camera on its underside circled a raft that was carrying a hundred desperate migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe. The surveillance footage from the airplane’s camera was transmitted live to an office in Warsaw, Poland, at the headquarters of Frontex, the European Union’s border patrol agency.

Two hours later, a Libyan Coast Guard cutter caught up with the migrants and ordered them to stop, even though they were well outside of Libyan waters. The armed officers took the migrants on board, beat them mercilessly, and carried them back to Libya’s gulag of detention centers. Two months later, one of the passengers, the 28-year-old Bissau Guinean and father of three Aliou Candé, was shot and killed in Libya's most notorious detention center, Al Mabani.

Though illegal under international law, the Libyan capture of migrants on the Mediterranean Sea has become commonplace in recent years as the EU has outsourced its effort to stop refugees from crossing its borders. Of course, Europe is not alone in this effort. Australia detains undocumented migrants in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Under the Obama administration, the American government paid the Mexican government to detain undocumented people trying to enter the US. The Trump administration has since gone a big step further: shipping hundreds of undocumented people from US soil to a notoriously brutal mega-prison in El Salvador.

Candé’s story unfolds over the first three episodes of the new season of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, an eight-part documentary series that brings together years of reporting at sea. The first episode delves into the circumstances around Candé’s death. The second episode uncovers the EU’s complicity in the migrant crisis. The third episode provides a chilling firsthand account of the violence faced in Tripoli by the journalists reporting on Candé’s death. Season 1 of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast won a variety of awards in 2024, including the “Dan Rather Award for News and Guts” and a “Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights”. Season 2 launched on June 4, 2025 in collaboration with CBC Podcasts, with one episode per week.

For over a decade, the EU has supplied the coast guard cutters, supplies for detention centers, aerial intelligence and vehicles that the Libyans use to capture migrants crossing the Mediterranean hoping for a better life. Efficient and brutal, the at-sea capture and internment of these migrants in prisons in and around Tripoli is what European Union officials hail as part of a successful partnership with Libya in their “humanitarian rescue” efforts across the Mediterranean. But the true intent of this joint campaign, according to many human rights advocates, legal experts and members of the European Parliament, is less to save migrants from trafficking or drowning than to stop them from reaching European shores.

Though the Libyan Coast Guard routinely opens fire on migrant rafts, has been tied by the U.N. to human trafficking and murder and is now run by militias, it continues to draw strong E.U. support. Since at least 2017, the E.U., led by Italy, has trained and equipped the Libyan Coast Guard to serve as a proxy maritime force, whose central purpose is to stop migrants from reaching European shores.

As part of a broader investigation, a reporter for The Outlaw Ocean joined a five-week stint on a Doctors Without Borders ship conducting at-sea search-and-rescue work on the Mediterranean looking to save the lives of migrants crossing the sea from Africa to Europe. The work is a life-or-death race. While the humanitarian ship tries to rescue migrants and take them to safety in Europe, the far faster, bigger and more aggressive Libyan Coast Guard ships try to get to them first so they can instead arrest them and return them to prisons in Libya. Europe has long denied playing an active role in this effort but the reporters filmed drones operated by Frontex, Europe’s border agency, that are used by Europe to alert the Libyans to the exact location of migrant rafts.

“[Frontex] has never engaged in any direct cooperation with Libyan authorities.” the Frontex press office said in a statement, in response to requests for comment on the investigation. But a mounting body of evidence collected by European journalists and nongovernmental organizations suggested Frontex’s involvement with the Libyan authorities was neither accidental nor limited. In 2020, for instance, Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch nonprofit journalism organization, documented 20 instances in which Frontex aircraft were in the vicinity of migrant boats later captured by the Libyan Coast Guard. In a dozen of those cases, Lighthouse determined, Frontex was the first to identify the boats, meaning that under international law, it was obliged to notify not just the Libyan Coast Guard, but the nearest vessel — government or commercial — so that a rescue might be promptly undertaken.

Aside from the EU role in helping Libyan capture migrants at sea, the United Nations as well as humanitarian and human rights groups have roundly criticized European authorities for its role in creating and subsidizing a gulag of brutal migrant prisons in Libya. The EU has provided Libya with coast guard cutters, SUVs, and buses for moving captured migrants to prison.

For the E.U., the challenge of how best to handle desperate migrants fleeing hardships in their native countries will only grow in coming years. Climate change is expected to displace 150 million people across the globe in the next 50 years. Rising seas, desertification, famine promises to drive desperate people to global north countries like the US and those in Europe, testing the moral character and political imagination of these wealthier nations.

These factors were especially palpable for Aliou Candé, who grew up on a farm near the remote village of Sintchan Demba Gaira, Guinea-Bissau, a place without many of the basics of plumbing or electricity. Candé had a reputation as a dogged worker, who avoided trouble of any kind. “People respected him,” his brother Jacaria said.

But the 28 year old would become a climate migrant— droughts in Guinea-Bissau had become more common and longer; flooding became more unpredictable and damaging; Candé’s crops—cassava, mangoes, and cashews—were failing and his children were hungry. Milk production from his cows was so meager, his children were allowed to drink it once a month. The shift in climate had made for more mosquitos, and with them more disease. He believed there was only one way to improve their conditions: to go to Europe. His brothers had done it. His family encouraged him to try.

In the late summer of 2019, he set out for Europe with six hundred Euros. He told his wife he was not sure how long he’d be away, but he did his best to be optimistic. “I love you,” he told her, “and I’ll be back.” In January 2020, he arrived in Morocco, where he tried to pay for a passage on a boat to Spain, but learned that the price was three thousand Euros, much more than he had.

Candé then headed to Libya, where he could book a cheaper raft to Italy. In February 2021, he and more than a hundred other migrants pushed off from the Libyan shore aboard an inflatable rubber raft. After their boat was detected by the Libyan Coast Guard, the migrants were taken back to land, loaded by armed guards into buses and trucks, and driven to Al Mabani, which is Arabic for “the buildings.”

Candé was not charged with a crime or allowed to speak to a lawyer, and he was given no indication of how long he’d be detained. In his first days there, he kept mostly to himself, submitting to the grim routines of the place. The prison is controlled by a militia that euphemistically calls itself the Public Security Agency, and its gunmen patrolled the hallways.

Cells were so crowded that the detainees had to sleep in shifts. In a special room, guards hung migrants upside from ceiling beams and beat them. In an audio message recorded on a hidden cell phone, Candé made a plea to his family to send the ransom for his release.

In the early hours of April 8, 2021, he was shot to death when the guards fired into a cellblock of detainees after a fight. His death went uninvestigated, his killer unpunished. Aliou Candé wound up buried in an overcrowded migrant cemetery in Tripoli, more than 2,000 miles from his family in Guinea-Bissau.

One month after Candé’s death, a team of four reporters traveled to Libya to investigate. Almost no Western journalists are permitted to enter Libya, but, with the help of an international aid group, they were granted visas.

Initially, Libyan officials said the team could visit Al Mabani, but after a week in Tripoli it became clear that this would not happen. So the journalists found a hidden spot on a side street, half-mile from the detention center, and launched a small drone. The drone made it to the facility unnoticed, and captured close-ups of the prison’s open courtyard. The team also interviewed dozens of migrants who had been imprisoned with Candé at the same detention center.

A week into the investigation, the lead reporter, speaking with his wife from his hotel room in Tripoli, heard a knock at the door. Upon opening it, he was confronted by a dozen armed men who stormed into the room. He was immediately forced to the ground, a gun pressed to his forehead, and a hood placed over his head. What followed was a violent assault. The journalist sustained broken ribs, facial injuries, and internal trauma after being kicked repeatedly.

Other members of the team - including an editor, photographer, and filmmaker - were also detained. The group was blindfolded, separated, and interrogated for hours at a time. Under Libyan law, authorities may detain foreign nationals indefinitely without formal charges.

The U.S. State Department became involved after the journalist's wife, who had heard the commotion over the phone, raised the alarm. American officials quickly identified the detaining authority and began negotiating for the team's release.

After six days in custody, the team was unexpectedly told they were free to leave. No formal charges were filed, and no official explanation for their detention was provided. They were lucky. The experience—deeply frightening but mercifully short—offered a glimpse into the world of indefinite detention in Libya.

With no explanation from the government, fanfare by aid groups, nor coverage by domestic or foreign media, Libya’s most notorious migrant prison, Al Mabani, officially closed on January 13, 2022. In its roughly 12-month lifespan, the prison became emblematic of the unaccountable nature of Libya’s broader detention system.

The quiet shuttering of Al Mabani shows the ever-shifting nature of incarceration in Libya and how such transience makes protection of detainees nearly impossible. Migrant detention centers open, close, and reopen from one week to the next. Detainees are moved with little tracking. Three thousand people are taken from one prison and, mysteriously, only 2,500 of them get off the bus at the next. It takes months for aid workers to get permission for regular visits to prisons like Al Mabani—only to have to start these negotiations over again when these detainees get to a newly created prison. The consequence: militias can, with confident impunity, disappear, torture and detain refugees indefinitely.

In the same month that Al Mabani was closed, the team behind the reporting presented details of their investigation to the European Parliament’s human rights committee, and outlined the E.U.’s extensive support to Libya’s migration control apparatus. European Commission representatives took issue with the reporters’ characterisation of the crisis. “We are not funding the war against migrants,” said Rosamaria Gili, the Libya country director at the European External Action Service. “We are trying to instill a culture of human rights.”

And yet, just a week later, Henrike Trautmann, a representative of the European Commission, told lawmakers that the E.U. was going to provide five more vessels to the Libyan Coast Guard to bolster its ability to intercept migrants on the high seas.

“We know the Libyan context is far from optimal for this,” Trautmann conceded. “We think it’s still preferable to continue to support this than to leave them to their own devices.”

Meanwhile, the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean continues. At least two thousand migrants died in 2024 while making this perilous passage, according to the UN, and, during the same period, the Libyan Coast Guard captured an additional twenty thousand that they brought back to prisons like Al Mabani in and around Tripoli. In February of this year, Libyan authorities held a training exercise with the EU border officials.

The Trump administration has also taken note: in May, floating the idea of sending undocumented migrants from the US to Libya. The administration also held discussions in May with Libyan officials, according to NBC News, about permanently relocating up to a million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.

The status of both of those plans remains unclear.

Hi Folks,

I’m thrilled to announce that on June 4th, 2025, we will release Season 2 of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast. It’s an anthology that covers a variety of topics, including our investigation of the EU’s role in capturing migrants on the Mediterranean Sea and sending them back to notoriously brutal prisons in Libya. The series also offers a deep-dive into China’s role as the superpower of seafood and the variety of human rights and environmental crimes hidden within the production of this vital global commodity. We take listeners on a mission in Greece, shadowing a maritime repo man who has been hired by banks to steal a ship and secret it out to the high seas. We also head to India for an exploration of some of the hidden costs behind the world’s largest shrimp producer. 

Every Wednesday, starting this week, we’ll push out a new episode detailing a variety of issues and colorful characters. This immersive audio documentary series brings together more than eight years of reporting at sea on all seven oceans and more than three dozen countries.

You can listen to the episodes as they come out by clicking here:

OUTLAW OCEAN PODCAST

This season is being released in collaboration with CBC Podcasts. For a fuller preview of each episode, here are short synopses:

Three-part series about Libya and a war on migration, funded by the EU:

The Libyan Coast Guard is doing the European Union’s dirty work, capturing migrants as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe and throwing them in secret prisons. There, they are extorted, abused and sometimes killed. An investigation into the death of Aliou Candé, a young farmer and father from Gineau-Bisseau, puts the Outlaw Ocean team in the cross-hairs of Libya’s violent and repressive regime. In this stunning three-part series, we take you inside the walls of one of the most dangerous prisons, in a lawless regime where the world’s forgotten migrants languish. 

The grandfather of white collar piracy:

Depending on who you ask, Max Hardberger is either a seagoing James Bond or a swashbuckling pirate. Hardberger runs a rare kind of repo service, extracting huge ships from foreign ports. His company is a last resort for ship owners whose vessels have been seized, often by bad actors, and over the years he’s built a reputation for taking the kinds of jobs others turn down. Hardberger’s specialty is infiltrating hostile territory and taking control of ships in whatever way he can – usually through subterfuge and stealth. Whatever part of the world his missions take him, Hardberger thrives in its grey areas. 

The shrimp factory whistleblower:

What started off as a dream job, slowly revealed itself to be a nightmare. Josh Farenello moved to southern India to oversee a shrimp-processing plant, but it soon dawned on him that he’d been really been hired as an American face to “whitewash” a forced-labour factory. The largely female employees were effectively trapped on the compound, routinely underpaid, and forced to live in inhumane, unsanitary conditions. Over several months, Josh meticulously gathered evidence that he brought to the Outlaw Ocean team for this exclusive exposé.

The undisputed superpower of the seas:

Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is the single largest armada in human history. This three-part series is an unprecedented investigation into their secretive fishing practices. The fleet is so gargantuan that even the Chinese government can’t account for all its vessels. We do know it has hauled in more than 35 billion dollars worth of catch per year and sold it across the globe — and yet, almost nothing was known about its practices. That is, until the Outlaw Ocean team started asking questions, and eventually managed to get aboard.

The hidden cost of seafood:

Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is the single largest armada in human history. This three-part series is an unprecedented investigation into their secretive fishing practices. The fleet is so gargantuan that even the Chinese government can’t account for all its vessels. We do know it has hauled in more than 35 billion dollars worth of catch per year and has sold it across the globe — and yet, almost nothing was known about its practices. That is, until The Outlaw Ocean team started asking questions, and eventually managed to climbget aboard a dozen Chinese vessels to investigate.

The untold plight of North Korean workers:

Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is the single largest armada in human history. This three-part series is an unprecedented investigation into their secretive fishing practices. The fleet is so gargantuan that even the Chinese government can’t account for all its vessels. We do know it has hauled in more than 35 billion dollars worth of catch per year and has sold it across the globe — and yet, almost nothing was known about its practices. That is, until The Outlaw Ocean team started asking questions.

Bad things happened on the Zhen Fa 7. While this Chinese squid ship traversed the globe, the crew was beaten. They got horribly ill. They begged to leave the ship. The captain said no. Fishing illegally, he did not want to risk heading into port. 

One crew member, Daniel Aritonang, was eventually dropped off in the middle of the night on the dock in Montevideo. His body was covered in bruises. His feet and hands were grotesquely swollen from an avoidable malnutrition disease called beriberi. He had marks around his neck where someone had tied a rope. He died shortly thereafter in a nearby hospital. Aritonang’s death was far from unusual. On average, one dead body was dropped off in the port of Montevideo every 6 weeks, most of them from Chinese squid ships like the Zhen Fa 7. 

This week, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency announced that they wanted nothing to do with this ship. 

“Effective immediately, CBP officers at all U.S. ports of entry will detain seafood, including but not limited to squid, harvested by Zhen Fa 7 based on reasonable suspicion that the vessel uses forced labor to harvest such seafood,” the CBP said in a press release. “As a result of these forced labor abuses, Zhen Fa 7 benefitted from lower labor costs, produced goods below market value, undercut American businesses, and unjustly earned profits.”

This “Withhold Release Order” or WRO was based on a 4-year investigation by the Outlaw Ocean about hidden crimes in China’s role as the superpower of seafood. The lead story in that investigation focussed on Aritonang. That investigation looked at crimes like human trafficking, murder, and illegal fishing on the high seas globally. It also looked into the use of state sponsored forced labor (specifically the use of Uyghurs and North Korean workers) in seafood factories in China on land. 

Why is this an US economic issue? Because we found that squid from the Zhen Fa 7 as well as that processed in factories using illegal forced labor in processing plants on land in China, was being made into calamari, imported to the US, and then sold to American grocery stores and served at taxpayer-funded institutions like American military bases, public schools, federal prisons, even the cafeteria of Congress. 

This week’s WRO from federal authorities was also the result of a year and a half of tireless work by the Human Trafficking Legal Center, which molded the Outlaw Ocean’s reporting into a formal petition to the government. Congratulations also goes to the New Yorker, the primary publishing partner for our investigation and kudos to the 241 other news outlets in 43 countries and 24 languages (Reach page) that further published the reporting, thereby sparking a global clamor. 

In the past several months, Congressional, State Department and White House staff have contacted the Outlaw Ocean asking about the investigation into China. Most often they have sought updates on other areas where they might take action. Typically, we explain our approach and findings and then direct them to our Impact page which tracks what change the investigation has already spurred including actions like legislation passed, Congressional hearings, company ties to plants severed, op-Eds published, resignation of a seafood CEO, document requests from lawmakers, EU parliamentary debate, and company shareholder resolutions spurred. Still pending are two important petitions – one submitted to CBP calling for US import restrictions on the Wei Yu 18, another Chinese squid vessel using forced labor, and a second submitted to the Department of Treasury seeking formal sanctions against seven Chinese companies that were revealed as being tied to Uyghur forced labor.

Already done: the Dept. of Homeland Security last year blocked imports from a major Chinese seafood and added Chinese seafood categorically to the list of high priority enforcement targets tied to Uyghur forced labor. Lawmakers pressured Sysco and Costco, to get them to fix how they check for forced labor tied to Chinese seafood.

These are all worthy steps. We hope to see more. 

It’s worth mentioning that our investigation into the Chinese fishing fleet is far from finished. In fact, next week we release Season 2 of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast (with the CBC), which will be an 8-part anthology that delves further into this and other topics.

The illegal or unregulated behavior of this fleet has since been well documented. At least 30 of them had arrived in the bank after fleeing crackdowns on fishing violations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, according to a report from Greenpeace. At least 24 of them that fished in the Saya de Malha Bank had committed fishing violations, mostly from a lack of valid fishing-gear licenses, according to a 2016 Thai government report. The Thai government was not yet a member of the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement. So, none of the vessels were approved to fish in the bank by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission—two of the main international oversight bodies meant to protect this area of water. Thailand’s Director-General of the Department of Fisheries later confirmed the vessels were “operating in an area free of regulatory control.”

The impact of the Thai fishmeal fleet was “catastrophic” to the Saya de Malha Bank, according to researchers from Monaco Explorations, who visited the area in 2022 in an expedition partly sponsored by the governments of Seychelles and Mauritius. “It seems remarkable that the Thai government permitted its fishing fleet to commence trawl fishing,” the organization said in their final report. “Even a cursory glance” at the existing literature should have dissuaded any trawling, the researchers added. Citing a 2008 study that said trawling could “irreversibly destroy seagrass and coral biotopes and cause depletion of particular species,” the study also questioned whether the Thai government’s decision to approve trawling was a “case of complete negligence” or a “deliberate policy to trawl the bank prior to joining Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement.” It is “astonishing” that trawling was still taking place, the researchers concluded.

The Thai fishmeal trawlers have continued to return annually to the Saya de Malha Bank but typically with fewer vessels than in 2015. In 2023, only two trawlers, the Maneengern 5 and Chokephoemsin 1, were still authorized by the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement.

More recently, the bigger fishing presence in the Saya de Malha Bank consists of Taiwanese tuna longliners and Sri Lankan gillnetters. Longliners are vessels that deploy fishing lines, sometimes stretching 40 miles, that are baited at regular intervals. Gillnetters hang wide panels of netting in the water, keeping them attached to the surface via floating lines.

Over 230 vessels fished in the vicinity of the Saya de Malha Bank between January 2021 and January 2024. Most of these ships (over 100) were from Sri Lanka and many were gillnetters, according to data from Global Fishing Watch. The second largest group were from Taiwan (over 70). At least 13 of these ships from Taiwan and four from Sri Lanka have been reprimanded by their national authorities for illegal or unregulated fishing, with transgressions including the illegal transport of shark fins or shark carcasses with their fins removed, the falsification of catch reports, and illegal fishing in the waters of countries including Mauritius and Seychelles.

The presence of these ships poses a dire threat to biodiversity in the bank, according to ocean scientists. Jessica Gephart, a fisheries-science professor at the University of Washington, explained that the Saya de Malha Bank is a breeding ground for humpback and blue whales which can be injured or killed by ship collisions. The worry is that fishing vessels may not just cut down the seagrass, warned James Fourqurean, a biology professor at Florida International University. These ships also risk causing turbidity, making the water opaque by stirring up the seafloor, and thereby harming the balance of species and food pyramid.

Aren’t there laws or treaties that protect the Saya de Malha Bank? Not really. International institutions known as regional fisheries-management organizations are supposed to regulate fishing activities in areas of the high seas like the Saya de Malha Bank. They are responsible for establishing binding measures for the conservation and sustainable management of highly migratory fish species. Their roles and jurisdictions vary, but most can impose management measures such as catch limits. These organizations are often criticized by ocean conservationists, however, because their rules only apply to signatory countries and are crafted by consensus, which opens the process to industry influence and political pressure, according to a 2024 Greenpeace report.

The Saya de Malha, as an archetypal example of these limitations, is governed by the Southern Indian Oceans Fisheries Agreement. Sri Lanka, the home of the bank’s largest fleet, is not a signatory.

This is the final installment in our series on the Saya de Malha. Click here to explore more:

ROBBING A BANK WHEN NO ONE’S LOOKING

Most of the bank is too shallow to be a likely candidate for such mining. But some of the waters surrounding the bank, in particular those outside the seagrass area on the broader Mascarene Plateau, reach depths over 9,000 feet and are well suited for mining. Consequently, several companies have already signed long-term exploration contracts to mine for precious metals including titanium, nickel, and cobalt in these waters.

To vacuum up the treasured nodules requires industrial extraction by massive excavators. Typically 30 times the weight of regular bulldozers, these machines are lifted by cranes over the sides of ships, then lowered miles underwater, where they drive along the seafloor, suctioning up the rocks, crushing them and sending a slurry of pulverized nodules and seabed sediments from between two-and-a-half and four miles undersea through a series of pipes to the vessel above. After separating out the minerals, the mining ships then pipe back overboard the processed waters, sediment, and mining “fines” (small particles of the ground up nodule ore).

In 1987, studies in the Mascarene Basin, an area of the Indian Ocean that includes the Saya de Malha Bank, found deposits possibly containing cobalt over an area of about 4,500 square miles. South Korea holds a contract from the International Seabed Authority (the international agency that regulates seabed mining) to explore hydrothermal vents on the Central Indian Ridge, about 250 miles east of Saya de Malha. This contract began in 2014 and will expire in 2029, and explorations in the area are already underway. India and Germany also hold exploration contracts for an area about 800 miles southeast of the Saya de Malha Bank.

This industry activity on the seafloor will be disastrous for the bank’s ecosystem, according to ocean researchers. Mining and exploration activity will raise sediments from the ocean floor, reducing the seagrass’s access to the sunlight it depends on. Sediment clouds from mining can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles, potentially disrupting the entire mid-water food web and affecting important species such as tuna. The ocean floor is slow to recover from mining activity.

In 2022, scientists dispatched an underwater drone off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, and found that tracks were still visible from a deep-seabed mining test that had been completed there half a century ago, according to a report by the Post and Courier, a daily newspaper. The areas between the tracks were devoid of fish, sponges, or nodules. Research published in 2023 found that a year after test seabed mining disturbed the ocean floor in Japanese waters, the density of fish, crustaceans, and jellyfish in nearby areas was cut in half.

Proponents of deep seabed mining stress a growing need for these resources. In 2020, the World Bank estimated that the global production of minerals like cobalt and lithium would have to be increased by over 450 percent by 2050 to meet the growing demand for clean energy technology. “It’s a race between countries to overtake one another in emerging and prime technologies,” Arvin Boolell, Mauritius’ former foreign minister, said, adding that with such resources being used up on land, “the seabed is seen as the next frontier.”

However, skeptics of the industry contend that battery technology is changing so quickly that the batteries used now are not going to look like those used in the near future. They also say that companies can rely on recovering and recycling used batteries. Other critics see the mining as a ponzi scheme of sorts that is meant to draw venture capital investment but in fact has little real chance to make money in the long term. These skeptics say that due to the long transport distances and corrosive and unpredictable conditions at sea, the cost of mining nodules offshore will far outstrip the price of doing so on land. Furthermore, many of the largest car and tech companies have publicly stated that they are not interested in minerals from the deep sea. “There is massive investment now being put into developing batteries that don’t use these metals at all.” Better product design, recycling and reuse of metals already in circulation, urban mining, and other ‘circular’ economy initiatives can vastly reduce the need for new sources of metals, said Matthew Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

In July 2024, a group of ocean researchers filed a complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that The Metals Company, the biggest seabed mining stakeholder, had misled investors and regulators. More recently, The Metals Company, has begun pivoting away from an argument about batteries and instead claimed the metals are needed for missiles and military purposes.

Still, the poorer countries nearest to the Saya de Malha Bank continue to weigh their options. In 2021, Mauritius hosted a workshop with the African Union and Norad, the Norwegian agency for developmental cooperation, to look into seabed mining prospects. Government officials in Mauritius and Seychelles have said they’re taking a “precautionary” approach to deep sea mining, but are still moving forward with pursuing resources in their waters despite the warnings of ecological catastrophe. And in September 2024, the countries agreed to a deal to initiate oil exploration in and around the Saya de Malha Bank, a region they jointly manage.

Elsewhere, skepticism about this type of mining has increased. Over thirty countries called for a moratorium or a precautionary pause on deep seabed mining, according to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, a collective of NGOs and policy institutes that works to counter threats to the deep sea. In 2021, Greenpeace, a member of the conservation coalition, chose the Saya de Malha Bank as the location for the first ever underwater protest of deep seabed mining.

Shaama Sandooyea, a 24-year-old marine biologist from Mauritius, dove into the bank’s shallow waters with a sign reading “Youth Strike for Climate.” She had a simple point to make; that the pursuit of minerals from the seafloor, without understanding the consequences, was not the route to a green transition. She said: “Seagrasses have been underestimated for a long time now.”

The Saya de Malha Bank has been especially attractive for such ambitions. Covered with sea grass and interspersed with small coral reefs, the bank is among the largest submerged ocean plateaus in the world—less than 33 feet deep in some areas. Near the equator, the water temperature at the Saya de Malha varies from 23°C to 28°C, depending on the season. Waves are broken in the shallower areas. But the biggest allure is that the bank is hundreds of miles beyond the jurisdictional reach of any nation’s laws.

On March 9, 1997, an architect named Wolf Hilbertz and a marine biologist named Thomas Goreau sailed to the bank. Launching from Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, the voyage took 3 days. With solar panels, metal scaffolding and cornerstones, they began constructing their vision for a sovereign micronation that they planned to call Autopia (the place that builds itself).“Having about the size of Belgium, most of Saya lies in international waters, ‘in the high seas’ legally speaking, governed only by the U.N. Law of the Sea,” Hilbertz told Celestopea Times in 2004.

In 2002, the two men returned to the bank in three sailboats with a team of architects, cartographers and marine biologists from several countries to continue building. They intended to erect their dwellings on top of existing coral, reinforcing steel scaffolding using a patented process that Hilbertz had developed called Biorock, a substance formed by the electro-accumulation of materials dissolved in seawater. This involved sinking steel frames into the shallow waters then putting these steel poles under a weak direct electrical current. Little by little, limestone is deposited on the steel poles and at their base, creating an ideal habitat for corals and other shellfish and marine animals.

Rushing because a cyclone was headed their way in a matter of days, the team built in six days a steel structure five by five by two meters high. The structure, located specifically at 9°12′ south latitude and 61°21′ east longitude, was anchored in the seabed and a small battery provided steady charge. In later interviews, Hilbertz, who was a professor at the University of Houston, said he hoped to create building materials with a lower carbon footprint and create a self-sufficient settlement in the sea “that belongs to the residents who live and work there, a living laboratory in which new environmental technologies are developed.” His plans ultimately stalled for lack of funds.

Two decades later, a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi began promoting a new vision for a micronation in the Saya de Malha Bank. He planned to park a massive barge near the seagrass patch far from the reach of extradition and police. “Because the Saya de Malha is not far from the equator, cyclones are born there but they are not so terrible,” Landi said in an interview in a yet-unreleased documentary film by Oswald Horowitz called “The Legend of Landi.” A gifted computer programmer, avid skydiver, and motorcycle racer, Landi had been a man on the lam for roughly a decade. Accused of fraud after his company, Eutelia, declared bankruptcy in 2010, Landi and some of its executives were tried and convicted in Italy. Landi was sentenced in absentia to 14 years, which led him to relocate to Dubai where he dabbled in crypto, hid money in Switzerland, and skated around extradition treaties. While living comfortably in Dubai, he registered companies in bespoke tax-free zones, and eventually procured diplomatic credentials from Liberia, according to a New York Times profile of him.

 In 2024, Samuele Landi’s organization produced a 3D model for a floating city that would be arranged on twenty barges in Saya de Malha Bank. Credit: The Legend of Landi by Oswald Horowitz / The Outlaw Ocean Project

As he prepared this plan for moving to the Saya de Malha Bank, Landi purchased an initial 800-ton deck barge that he named Aisland. Anchoring it roughly 30 miles off the coast of Dubai, he lived on the vessel with three sailors, a cook and five cats. Aisland’s deck was fitted with six blue shipping containers bolted in place—living quarters, equipped with solar-powered air-conditioners and a desalination system. Landi stayed there for over a year as he raised money to buy another barge twice as large as the Aisland. He even hired an architect named Peter de Vries to help design plans for the re-fit of the new barge so that it could sail to the Saya de Malha Bank and survive there. Landi hoped to eventually expand his Saya de Malha project to create a floating city consisting of about twenty barges, which would, by 2028, house thousands of permanent residents in luxury villas and apartments. Since the area has been known to entice pirates and other sea marauders, Landi also planned to mount a Gatling gun on the Aisland. “That’s one of these guns that fires 1,000 rounds a minute—very heavy-duty stuff,” Peter de Vries said in an interview with the Times. “I actually got the specs for the gun.”

The movement to create sovereign states on the high seas has a colorful history. Typically such projects have been imbued with the view that government was a kind of kryptonite that weakened entrepreneurialism. Many held a highly optimistic outlook on technology and its potential to solve human problems. The founders of these micronations—in the 2000s quite a few dot-com tycoons—were usually men of means, steeped in Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes. Conceptualized as self-sufficient, self-governing, sea-bound communities, the vision for these waterborne cities was part libertarian utopia, part billionaire’s playground. Fittingly, they have been called, in more recent years, seasteads, after the homesteads of the American West.

In 2008, these visionaries coalesced around a non-profit organization called The Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government. The institute’s primary benefactor was Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal, who put over $1.25 million into the organization and related projects. Where Elon Musk has promoted a vision of fleeing earthly encumberments by colonizing Mars, these libertarians had similar aspirations for the high seas.

Long before the Seasteading Institute, the interest in offshore micronations spurred dozens of daring and often ill-fated schemes. In the early 1970s, a Las Vegas real-estate magnate named Michael Oliver sent barges loaded with sand from Australia to a set of shallow reefs near the island of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean, declaring his creation The Republic of Minerva. Within months, Tonga sent troops to the site to enforce its 12-mile offshore territorial claim, expelling the Minervan occupants and removing their flag—a single torch on a blue background. In 1982, a group of Americans led by Morris C. “Bud” Davis tried to occupy the reefs. Within weeks, they too were forced off by Tongan troops.

Other projects met a similar fate. In 1968, a wealthy American libertarian named Werner Stiefel attempted to create a floating micronation called Operation Atlantis in international waters near the Bahamas. He bought a large boat and sent it to his presumptive territory. It sank soon thereafter in a hurricane. Another wealthy libertarian, Norman Nixon, raised about $400,000 to create a floating city called the Freedom Ship, a 4,500-foot vessel about four times the length of the Queen Mary 2. The ship was never built.

Part of the reason these projects failed to get off the drawing board was that the ocean is a far less inviting place than architectural renderings tend to suggest. At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave and solar energy, but building renewable-energy systems that can survive the weather and corrosive seawater is difficult and costly.

On February 2, 2024, Landi and his crew tragically learned this hard lesson. The Aisland was slammed by a rogue wave, which breached the hull, breaking the barge in two. Two members of Landi’s crew survived by clinging onto pieces of wood until a passing vessel rescued them the next day. Landi and the two remaining seafarers died. According to Italian news reports, Landi put out a call for help, but it didn’t come in time. His body was found several days later, when it washed up on the beach about 40 miles up the coastline from Dubai.

Looking gaunt and desperate, the crew told the Webbs, having sailed roughly 2,000 miles from their home port in Beruwala, Sri Lanka, they had been at sea for two weeks and had only caught four fish. They begged the Webbs for food, soda, and cigarettes. The Webbs gave them what they could, including fresh water, then headed on their way. “They were clearly in a struggling financial position,” Mrs. Webb said. “It broke my heart to see the efforts they feel they must go to to provide for their families.”

A month later, again near the Saya de Malha Bank, the Hasaranga Putha hailed another vessel—the South African ocean research and supply ship S.A. Agulhas II, which was on an expedition in Saya de Malha for the environmental non-profit Monaco Explorations. By this time, the Sri Lankan crew was almost out of fuel so they begged for diesel from the new passersby. The scientists did not have the right type of petrol to offer but they still boarded a dinghy and brought the fishers water and cigarettes. The Sri Lankans gave the scientists fish in appreciation. The Sri Lankan fishers would remain at sea for another six months, not returning to Colombo until April 2023.

Hundreds of miles from the nearest port, the Saya de Malha Bank is one of the most remote areas on the planet, which means it can be a harrowing workplace for the thousands of fishers from a half dozen countries that make this perilous journey. The farther from shore that vessels travel, and the more time they spend at sea, the more the risks pile up: dangerous storms, deadly accidents, malnutrition, and physical violence are common threats faced by distant-water crews. Among the longest trips, often in the least equipped boats, are made annually by a fleet of several dozen Sri Lankan gill-netters.

Some of the vessels that fish the Saya de Malha Bank engage in a practice called transshipment, where they offload their catch to refrigerated carriers without returning to shore so that they can remain fishing on the high seas for longer periods of time. Fishing is the most dangerous occupation in the world, and more than 100,000 fishers die on the job each year. When they do, particularly on longer journeys far from shore, it is not uncommon for their bodies to be buried at sea.

But Sri Lankan gillnetters are not the only fishers making a perilous journey to target this biodiverse seascape. Thai fishmeal trawlers also target these waters, traveling more than 2,500 nautical miles from the port of Kantang. At its height, this fleet numbered above 70 vessels, which were decimating the sea grass and were notorious for their working conditions.

In January 2016, for example, three of these Thai ships left the Saya de Malha Bank and returned to Thailand. During the journey, 38 Cambodian crew members fell ill, and by the time they returned to port, six had already died. The remaining sick crew were hospitalized and treated for beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency of Vitamin B1, or thiamine. Symptoms include tingling, burning, numbness, difficulty breathing, lethargy, chest pain, dizziness, confusion, and severe swelling.

Easily preventable yet fatal if left untreated, beriberi has historically appeared in prisons, asylums, and migrant camps, but it has largely been stamped out. Experts say that when it occurs at sea, beriberi often indicates criminal neglect (one medical examiner described it as “slow-motion murder”) because it is so easily treatable and avoidable.

The disease has become more prevalent on distant-water fishing vessels in part because ships stay so long at sea, a trend facilitated by transshipment. Working practices involving hard labor and extensive working hours cause the body to deplete vitamin B1 at a faster metabolic rate to produce energy, the Thai government concluded in a report on the deaths. Further research done by Greenpeace found that some of the workers were victims of forced labor.

Today, fewer vessels from the Thai fleet are traveling to the Saya de Malha Bank, but some still make the trip, and questions about their working conditions linger. In April 2023, one of those vessels, the Chokephoemsin 1, a bright blue 90-foot trawler, set out for the Saya de Malha Bank with a crew member named Ae Khunsena, who boarded the ship in Samut Prakan, Thailand for a five-month tour, according to a report compiled by Stella Maris, a non-profit organization that helps fishers. As is typical on high-seas vessels, the hours were long and punishing. Khunsena earned 10,000 baht, or about $288, per month, according to his contract.

In one of his last calls to his family through Facebook, Khunsena said he had witnessed a fight that resulted in more than one death. He said the body of a crew member who was killed was brought back to the ship and kept in the freezer. When his family pressed for details, Khunsena said he would tell them more later. He added that another Thai crew member who also witnessed the killing had been threatened with death and so he fled the ship while it was still near shore along the Thai coast. Khunsena’s family spoke to Khunsena for the last time on July 22, 2023. (A company official contested this claim and said no such fight happened and added that there was an observer from the Department of Fisheries aboard the vessel, who would have reported such an incident had it happened.)

On July 29, while working in waters near Sri Lanka, Khunsena went overboard, off the stern of the ship. The incident was captured on a ship security camera. A man listed as Khunsena’s employer on his contract named Chaiyapruk Kowikai told Khunsena’s family that he had jumped. The ship’s captain then spent a day unsuccessfully searching the area to rescue him, before returning to fishing, Kowikai said.

The vessel returned to port in Thailand roughly two months later. Police, company and insurance officials eventually concluded that Khunsena’s death was likely a suicide. This claim seemed to be backed up by the onboard footage, which does not show anyone near him when he goes over the side of the boat.

In September, 2024, a reporting team from the Outlaw Ocean Project visited Khunsena’s village. Settled by rice farmers about a century ago, Non Siao is located in Bua Lai District, Nakhon Ratchasima, roughly two hundred miles to the northeast of Bangkok. The reporting team interviewed Khusena’s mother and cousin as well as the local labor inspector, police chief, aid worker and an official from the company that owned the ship. While the police and company officials said the death was likely a suicide, Khusena’s family avidly disagreed. “Why would he jump?” said Palita, Khunsena’s cousin, explaining why she highly doubted that Khusena took his own life. “He didn’t have any problems with anyone.” Sitting on the ground under an overcast sky as she spoke with the reporter in a follow-up conversation by video chat, Palita went silent and looked down at her phone. “He wanted to see me,” added Khusena’s mother, Boonpeng Khunsena, who also doubted his suicide, since he kept saying in calls that he intended to be home by Mother’s Day. His family instead speculated that Khusena had likely witnessed a violent crime and therefore to silence him, he had been coerced to jump overboard.

As is often the case with crimes at sea, where evidence is limited, witnesses are few and frequently unreliable, it is difficult to know whether Khusena died from foul play. Perhaps, as his family speculated in interviews with The Outlaw Ocean Project, he witnessed a violent crime and was then silenced by being ordered to jump overboard. Perhaps, instead, he jumped willingly from the ship, a suicidal gesture likely driven by depression or mental health issues. In either scenario the point remains the same: these distant-water ships are traveling so far from shore that the working and living conditions are brutal and sometimes violent. And these very conditions are likely playing a role in sinister outcomes.

And yet, the human tragedy that criss-crosses this remote patch of high seas is not just tied to fishers. The Saya de Malha Bank has also become a transit route for migrants fleeing Sri Lanka. Since 2016, hundreds of Sri Lankans have attempted to make the perilous journey on fishing boats to the French-administered island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, some making the journey directly from Saya de Malha. Those who do succeed in making landfall on Reunion are often repatriated. In one case, on December 7, 2023, a Sri Lankan vessel that had spent the previous three months fishing in Saya de Malha, the Imul-A-0813 KLT, illegally entered the waters around Reunion. The seven crew members were apprehended by local authorities and repatriated to Sri Lanka two weeks later. Joining them on the repatriation flight were crew members of two other Sri Lankan fishing vessels that had previously been detained by Reunion authorities.

With near-shore stocks overfished in Thailand and Sri Lanka, vessel owners send their crews further and further from shore in search of a worthwhile catch. That is what makes the Saya de Malha—far from land, poorly monitored, and with a bountiful ecosystem—such an attractive target. But the fishers forced to work there live a precarious existence, and for some, the long journey to the Saya de Malha is the last they ever take.

When they were not diving, the scientists submerged a remote-controlled submarine to search the sea column. Ranked as one of the largest and most advanced research vessels in the world, the ship had been sent to this remote stretch by Monaco Explorations, an ocean research organization tied to H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco, to document a seafloor famously lush in seagrass, corals, turtles, dugongs, rays, and other species.

During the three weeks that the research team combed the waters of the Saya de Malha Bank, they spotted not a single shark.

The likely culprit, according to the scientists, was a fleet of more than 200 fishing ships that have in recent years targeted these remote waters, mostly from Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Many of these ships target tuna species like albacore, yellowfin, skipjack, and bigeye, but they are also catching sharks in huge numbers. 

Sharks play a critical role in the ecosystem as guardians of the seagrass, policing populations of turtles and other animals that would mow down all the seagrass if left unchecked. Catching sharks is not easy, nor is it usually inadvertent. In tuna longlining, the ship uses a line made of thick microfilament, with baited hooks attached at intervals. Many tuna longliners directly target sharks using special steel leads designed not to break as the bigger, stronger sharks try to yank themselves free. 

To avoid wasting space in the ship hold, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat. It’s a wasteful process and a slow death, as the sharks, still alive but unable to swim, sink to the seafloor. To offset poverty wages, ship captains typically allow their crew to supplement their income by keeping the fins to sell at port, off books. 

In 2015, more than fifty Thai fishing vessels, primarily bottom trawlers, descended on the Saya de Malha Bank to drag their nets over the ocean floor and scoop up brushtooth lizardfish and round scad, much of which was transported back to shore to be ground into fishmeal. At least thirty of these vessels arrived in the bank after fleeing crackdowns on fishing violations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The Thai fleet routinely targeted sharks in the Saya de Malha Bank, according to an investigation conducted by Greenpeace.

Trafficking survivors who worked in the Saya de Malha Bank on two of the vessels—the Kor Navamongkolchai 1 and Kor Navamongkolchai 8—told Greenpeace that up to fifty percent of their catch had been sharks. In 2016, a Thai government report found 24 vessels returning from Saya de Malha Bank had committed fishing violations, mostly from a lack of valid fishing gear licenses. “The impact of the trawl fishery on seabed ecosystems is likely to have been catastrophic,” said a 2022 study by the environmental non-profit Monaco Explorations. Since then, the Thai presence in the Saya de Malha Bank has diminished, and in 2024 only two Thai vessels targeted the area. 

The Sri Lankans and Taiwanese have continued to fish the bank intensely. Of the more than 100 Sri Lankan vessels that have fished in the Saya de Malha since January 2022, when the country’s fleet first began broadcasting vessel locations publicly, about half—or roughly 44—use gillnets, according to vessel data from the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. These gillnetters operate across the Indian Ocean, and a number of the vessels were observed at the bank by the 2022 Monaco Explorations expedition. Sharks are especially vulnerable to gillnets, which account for 64 percent of shark catches recorded by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission.

On August 17, 2024, a video was posted to YouTube showing dozens of shark and ray carcasses recently unloaded from vessels in the Sri Lankan port of Beruwala. In the video, a man butchers one shark with a machete, dark blood pooling on the concrete of the harbor as he hacks at the body, removing its fins and hauling entrails from the carcass. Several videos showing similar scenes—hundreds of dead sharks, some without fins, being unloaded from fishing vessels and lined up on Sri Lankan harbors for sale to local exporters—have been uploaded to YouTube over the past two years. 

The videos offer a window on the booming trade that has decimated local shark populations: about two-thirds of Sri Lanka’s domestic shark and ray species are listed as threatened by extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That threat has now moved further afield, to the high seas far from Sri Lankan shores, including to the Saya de Malha, putting yet more pressure on an ecosystem UNESCO has described as “globally unique,” an underwater jewel that, should it disappear, could never be replaced.

Historically, Sri Lankan vessels have targeted sharks in domestic waters. Between 2014 and 2016, for example, 84 percent of reported shark catches came from domestic vessels, according to research into the Sri Lankan shark and ray trade published in 2021. But as domestic populations declined, vessels, among them the fleet of gillnetters, moved to the high seas, leading to a new boom in the fin trade. Sri Lanka’s annual exports of fins quadrupled in the last decade, according to UN Comtrade data, with 110 tons exported in 2023, primarily to Hong Kong, compared to just 28 tons in 2013. 

Tracking data also shows that over 40 of the Sri Lankan vessels do not publicly broadcast their location while in the bank. This practice is a persistent barrier to ocean conservation, because it masks the true scale of the fleet or hides when these ships plan to engage in illegal behavior.

However, these “dark vessels” can be tracked by monitoring the signals from their fishing buoys. Sri Lankan vessels can have up to a dozen fishing buoys, each with its own unique identification signal, Sri Lankan fishing records indicate. 

At least one of these “hidden” vessels that fished in the Saya de Malha between March and June 2024, the IMUL-A-0064 KMN, was detained in August 2024 by Sri Lankan authorities with over half a ton of oceanic white-tip shark carcasses aboard, all with their fins removed. Catching oceanic white-tip sharks is prohibited under Sri Lankan law, as is the removal of shark fins at sea. This was not an isolated incident: Sri Lankan authorities have seized illegally harvested shark fins on at least 25 separate occasions since January 2021, according to press releases from the Sri Lankan Coast Guard.

Though Taiwanese law does not allow vessels to engage in shark finning, the practice still takes place. In a sample of 62 Taiwanese vessels fishing on the high seas between 2018 and 2020, half engaged in shark finning, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation, which interviewed former crew on the ships. At least one of the Taiwanese vessels that fishes in the Saya de Malha, the Ho Hsin Hsing No. 601, was penalized in May 2023 for having dried shark fins in its vessel hold. The vessel operator was fined the equivalent of $123,000 and had their fishing license suspended for a month. The ship had last fished in the Saya de Malha between September and October 2022. 

Why should anyone care about the disappearance of sharks in the Saya de Malha Bank? 

Ernest Hemingway once described going bankrupt as something that happens gradually... and then suddenly. The extinction of species is like bankruptcy, and when it finally occurs, there’s no going back. If we keep draining the Bank of one of its most previous riches, a “sudden” reckoning may be soon.

Researchers say that the bank is one of the least scientifically studied areas of the planet partly because of its remoteness. The area’s unpredictable depths have also meant that, over the centuries, merchant ships and explorers tended to avoid these waters. It has long been the type of fantastical realm so uncharted that on the old maps, it would be designated, ‘Here Be Monsters’. More recently, though, the bank is traversed by a diverse cast of characters, including shark finners, bottom trawlers, seabed miners, stranded fishers, starving crews, wealthy yachters, and libertarian seasteaders. 

The tragedy, however, is that since the Saya de Malha Bank is mostly located in international waters, where few rules apply, its biodiversity is being systematically decimated by a huge fleet of industrial fishing ships that remain largely unchecked by government oversight. The bank remains unprotected by any major binding treaties largely due to an anemia of political will by national authorities and a profits-now costs-later outlook of fishing interests. The question now: who will safeguard this public treasure?

Mowing Down An Eco-System

The Saya de Malha Bank is so existentially crucial to the planet because it is one of the world’s biggest seagrass meadows and thus carbon sinks. Much like trees on land, seagrass absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in its roots and soil. But seagrass does it especially fast—at a rate 35 times that of tropical rainforest. What makes the situation in the Saya de Malha Bank even more urgent is that it’s being systematically decimated by a multi-national fleet of fishing ships that virtually no one tracks or polices.

More than five hundred years ago, when Portuguese sailors came across a shallow-water bank on the high seas over 700 miles east of the northern tip of Mauritius, they named it Saya de Malha, or “mesh skirt,” to describe the rolling waves of seagrass below the surface. In 2012, UNESCO considered Saya de Malha as a potential candidate to become a Marine World Heritage site, for its “Potential Outstanding Universal Value.” UNESCO described the bank as “globally unique,” concluding that it was covered in what is likely the largest seagrass meadow in the world. 

Seagrasses are frequently overlooked because they are rare, estimated to cover only a tenth of one percent of the ocean floor. “They are the forgotten ecosystem,” said Ronald Jumeau, the Seychelles Ambassador for Climate Change. Nevertheless, seagrasses are far less protected than other offshore areas. Only 26 percent of recorded seagrass meadows fall within marine protected areas, compared with 40 percent of coral reefs and 43 percent of the world’s mangroves. 

Often described as the lungs of the ocean, seagrasses capture about a fifth of all its carbon and they are home to vast biodiversity. Thousands of species, including in the Saya de Malha Bank, many as yet unknown to science, depend on seagrasses for their survival. But the planet has lost roughly a third of them since the late nineteenth century and we lose 7 percent more each year – roughly equivalent to losing a football pitch of seagrass every 30 minutes. 

Seagrass also cleans polluted water and protects coastlines from erosion, according to a 2021 report by the University of California, Davis. At a time when at least eight million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, seagrass traps microplastics by acting as a dense net, catching debris and locking it into the sediment, found a 2021 study in Nature. At a time when ocean acidification threatens the survival of the world’s coral reefs and the thousands of fish species that inhabit them, seagrasses reduce acidity by absorbing carbon through photosynthesis, and provide shelters, nurseries, and feeding grounds for thousands of species, including endangered animals such as dugongs, sharks, and seahorses. 

But the Saya de Malha is under threat. More than 200 distant-water vessels - most of them from Sri Lanka and Taiwan - have parked in the deeper waters along the edge of the bank over the past few years to catch tuna, lizardfish, scad and forage fish that is turned into protein-rich fishmeal, a type of animal feed. Ocean conservationists say that efforts to conserve the bank’s sea grass are not moving fast enough to make a difference. “It’s like walking north on a southbound train,” Heidi Weiskel, Acting Head of Global Ocean Team for IUCN.

On May 23, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to declare March 1 as World Seagrass Day. The resolution was sponsored by Sri Lanka. Speaking at the assembly, the Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN, Ambassador Mohan Pieris, said seagrasses were “one of the most valuable marine ecosystems on earth,” highlighting, among other things, their outsized contribution to carbon sequestration. But recognition is one thing; action is another. As the ambassador gave his speech in New York, dozens of ships from his country’s fishing fleet were 9,000 miles away, busily scraping the biggest of those very ecosystems he was calling on the world to protect.