TAKALAR/EAST LOMBOK/JAKARTA, Indonesia — Mustam Daeng Beta exhaled slowly before he began describing his time as a young fisherman many years ago. “Fish bombing was regular, also using poison,” Daeng Beta told Mongabay Indonesia in an interview on April 22 at his home in the village of Tompotana in Indonesia’s Takalar district, South Sulawesi province. “[We] never got caught, maybe because my boss had the backing from a certain side. But that was a very long time ago.” On the island of Lombok, some 800 kilometers (500 miles) southwest of Takalar, across the Flores Sea, tour guide and certified scuba diver Herman also recalled dynamite fishing taking place with impunity. His home village of Padak Guar, in East Lombok district, features an expansive coral reef that Herman said was a key spawning and breeding site for fish. Locals initially fished with lines and nets, he said, until increasing demand for seafood drove them to more effective but also more destructive gear: trawl nets, potassium cyanide, and explosives. “I used to hear the racket from fish bombing,” Herman told Mongabay Indonesia in an interview in January. Daeng Beta, right, with a fellow member of the Pokmaswas group in Takalar district, South Sulawesi province. Image by Wahyu Chandra/Mongabay Indonesia. Herman is a member of the Pokmaswas group in East Lombok district, West Nusa Tenggara province. Image by Fathul Rakhman/Mongabay Indonesia. Both Daeng Beta and Herman had witnessed the damage that these kinds of fishing techniques were wreaking on the marine ecosystems in…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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