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<\/a><\/p>\nCorals on the barrier reef in the Bay of Ranobe. Overfishing has emptied the ocean of fish.<\/p>\n
It was a sunny morning in September, and I was diving on a coral reef in southwest Madagascar, an island nation that sits east of continental Africa. And like many reefs in the region and across much of the world<\/a>, it\u2019s on the verge of collapse. Overfishing has emptied the ocean here of fish, which over time will allow algae to take over and outcompete the corals. The increasing intensity of marine heat waves and cyclones, along with inland deforestation, also threatens the country\u2019s reefs, which are among the most biologically diverse in the world.<\/p>\n This is a major problem for people along the coast of southwest Madagascar. Their livelihood depends on fishing \u2014 catching marine critters is an essential, and often the only, source of food and income \u2014 yet as the reef collapses, so does the fishery. The reef is where fish sleep, eat, and hide from predators, and without it, they struggle to survive. It\u2019s a complicated situation: The health and well-being of people along the coast depends on fishing, yet too much fishing is a key reason why the reef, and the fishery it supports, is in decline.<\/p>\n This story is part of a series<\/p>\n This tension between human and wildlife survival is not unique to the coasts of southwest Madagascar. The island, home to about 33 million<\/a> people, is among the poorest of poor nations, with some 80 percent of its population<\/a> living on less than the equivalent of $2.15 a day. People often have no choice but to depend directly on ecosystems to meet their basic needs.<\/p>\n The government, meanwhile, has failed to provide even the most basic services like reliable electricity<\/a> and water<\/a>, let alone a pathway out of poverty and dependency on exploitation. That failure fueled weeks of youth-led protests<\/a> this fall in Madagascar, where the median age is around 20<\/a>. In response, Parliament impeached<\/a> the president on October 14 and the military seized control<\/a> of the government. What that power shift means for Madagascar, and for a generation demanding change, remains unclear.<\/p>\n Fishermen return from a morning working at sea in Ambolimailaky, a fishing village in the Bay of Ranobe.<\/p>\n An aerial view of Ambolimailaky.<\/p>\n Under the sheer weight of human need, it\u2019s no surprise, then, that many of the country\u2019s iconic ecosystems are failing, too. Research suggests<\/a> that since the turn of the century the country has lost as much as half of its live coral cover, and a similar extent of native forest. Nearly every species of lemur, a type of animal that you can only find in Madagascar, is now threatened with extinction<\/a>.<\/p>\n The government and nonprofit groups have spent decades \u2014 and hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid \u2014 trying to address these challenges, often relying on traditional environmental approaches, like setting up reserves that restrict fishing. But what Madagascar shows is that conservation projects don\u2019t usually work when they make it harder for desperately poor people to make a living. That may seem obvious, but it\u2019s one reason why many environmental projects have failed in the world\u2019s biodiversity hotspots, which are commonly found in poor nations.<\/p>\n Places like Madagascar underscore the need for a different conservation approach \u2014 one that truly centers people, and what they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives. That\u2019s what ultimately brought me to the Bay of Ranobe, where I spent a week in September. Guided by fishers and a team of international researchers, a small organization is trying to restore the fishery and the food it provides, without actually restricting fishing. The goal of the project is to help people. Conservation is just a byproduct.<\/p>\n The ocean was calm and flecked with sails when I arrived one morning at the beach in Ambolimailaky, a fishing village in the Bay of Ranobe. The sails \u2014 often made of discarded rice bags stitched together \u2014 propelled fishermen to shore in wooden canoes known as pirogues.<\/p>\n Vezo fishermen returning to the beach in Ambolimailaky after a morning at sea.<\/p>\n As the fishermen neared the beach, I saw jumbles of mosquito nets in some of their boats. In Madagascar and elsewhere in Africa, it\u2019s not uncommon for fishermen to repurpose mosquito nets \u2014 which are often donated by aid organizations to protect against malaria<\/a> \u2014 to catch fish.<\/p>\n The fishermen showed me what they caught. Some of them had buckets of small anchovies that moved like liquid silver. Others had a bin filled up halfway with reef fish like triggerfish, lionfish, parrotfish, and baby barracudas. A group of young kids put a few that were still alive, including a clownfish, into a metal bowl to play with. A pair of school-age boys showed me a plastic bucket with a dozen juvenile octopuses they caught. The tentacles were tangled together and partially submerged in ink.<\/p>\n Young octopuses caught by a pair of school-age fishers in Ambolimailaky.<\/p>\n Children sail a toy pirogue at the beach in Ambolimailaky.<\/p>\n A squid caught by a line fisherman.<\/p>\n A plastic bucket full of juvenile fish caught by beach seining, an indiscriminate fishing technique that involves dragging a net through the shallows.<\/p>\n As someone from the US who doesn\u2019t fish, I felt unsettled in the face of so many dead and dying creatures. I normally encounter reef fish and octopuses in aquariums, on snorkel trips, or in the marketing materials for conservation groups. But fishermen here have a different relationship with them \u2014 and for a very good reason.<\/p>\n In the Bay of Ranobe, fishing is the primary source of income and a vital source of nutrition in coastal villages, according to Aroniaina \u201cAro\u201d Manampitahiana Falinirina, a doctoral researcher who studies fisheries at the University of Toliara\u2019s marine research institute, IHSM. It\u2019s how people pay for food, school supplies, and transportation. And among certain communities \u2014 namely, the Vezo, an ethnic group with deep ancestral ties to the sea \u2014 fishing has been a way of life for generations.<\/p>\n Speaking through an interpreter, Nambokely, one of the fishermen I met on the beach, told me that if he doesn\u2019t fish, he doesn\u2019t eat.<\/p>\n Nambokely, a farmer-turned-fisherman in Ambolimailaky, migrated to the coast roughly 20 years ago when changing weather conditions made farming untenable.<\/p>\n Fishermen haul their sailing pirogue onshore in Sarodrano above the high tide mark.<\/p>\n Fishermen in the Bay of Ranobe work around the clock to support their families.<\/p>\n One evening, just after the sun had slipped below the horizon, I boated out on the water with a few researchers who study coral reefs and fisheries. The ocean\u2019s surface was full of bioluminescent microorganisms that lit up as the bow of our skiff cut through the waves. It was as if we were riding on fairy dust.<\/p>\n But the main light show was underwater. Once we were farther offshore, beams of light appeared below the waves, moving erratically in all directions \u2014 night fishermen. The fishermen spot their prey using waterproof torches, sometimes made by wrapping ordinary flashlights in a few condoms.<\/p>\n A small sea cucumber collected from the seafloor by a fisherman. When they\u2019re scared, these bizarre creatures will eject some of their internal organs \u2014 that\u2019s why this one looks so deflated.<\/p>\n A fisherman named Jean Batiste surfaces with an eel on his spear on the night of September 15.<\/p>\n Sitting on the edge of our boat, Jean Batiste shows us the eel he just caught.<\/p>\n After surfacing with an eel on his spear, one fisherman, a Vezo man named Jean Batiste, told me he fishes at night because he can catch more compared to during the day.<\/p>\n Yet as Batiste said \u2014 and as every fisher I spoke to in the Bay of Ranobe repeated \u2014 it\u2019s becoming harder and harder to catch anything, and thus harder and harder to earn a living. \u201cI\u2019m worried,\u201d Batiste told me that night on the water.<\/p>\n Natoraky, another fisherman on the water at night, speared a large triggerfish.<\/p>\n The fishery in the Bay of Ranobe, and across much of southwest Madagascar, is in decline, and perhaps even collapsing. A number of studies<\/a> from the region show that fishermen are catching fewer fish, and fewer fish species, compared to three or four decades ago. Some species \u2014 including certain kinds of parrotfish, which can help limit the growth of coral-harming algae \u2014 have disappeared<\/a> altogether from some areas. \u201cIt\u2019s decreasing at a rate that has never been seen before,\u201d said Gildas Todinanahary, a marine researcher and the director of IHSM.<\/p>\n The fish people are catching are also smaller<\/a>, indicating that fishermen may be netting more juveniles \u2014 a clear sign of overfishing. If the adults and the juveniles are fished out, there\u2019s nothing left to spawn the next generation.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople can\u2019t get enough food in one day.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Marcel Sebastian<\/p>\n A single fisherman was once able to earn, on a good day, around $10 or $15 in one outing, Nambokely told me. But today, groups of four or five fishermen will spend several hours on the water and might only catch enough to fill half a plastic wash basin with fish. That\u2019s worth about $5 to $10, they told me, which they then have to split among themselves. A dozen small octopuses, meanwhile, are worth only around $2.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople can\u2019t get enough food in one day,\u201d said Marcel Sebastian, an elderly fisherman I met in the village. He\u2019s been fishing in southwest Madagascar for more than 50 years. \u201cThey used to have lunch and dinner. But now they only have dinner due to the scarcity of fish.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem isn\u2019t fishing. It\u2019s overfishing \u2014 the forces that ramp up fishing to such an extreme that the reef and the life it supports have no time to recover. That\u2019s what\u2019s happening now in southwest Madagascar. There are simply too many people fishing for the same fish.<\/p>\n One reason for that is climate change. Rising temperatures are contributing to prolonged droughts that make it harder to grow crops in southern Madagascar<\/a>. Meanwhile, widespread deforestation \u2014 which removes trees that stabilize the soil and help water seep underground \u2014 means that when it does rain, flooding can bury farmland under sediment. Faced with failing crops inland, farmers in southern Madagascar are increasingly migrating to the coasts in search of income from fishing instead. (Inland deforestation is also sending dirt into the ocean, which can smother coral reefs.)<\/p>\n A beach seine in Ambolimailaky, viewed from a drone.<\/p>\n This climate-driven migration is causing the coastal population to swell, putting pressure on the fishery. It\u2019s hard to find reliable population estimates for the Bay of Ranobe, but a dissertation from 2019<\/a> estimated that villages here were growing at an average rate of about 4.5 percent per year, meaning the local population would roughly double in 15 years. The global average population growth rate is around 1 percent<\/a>. \u201cA lot of the time, people who are coming from inland don\u2019t want to be here,\u201d said Quinn Mitsuko Parker, a doctoral researcher at Stanford who studies fishing communities in the Bay of Ranobe. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to be fishing. They\u2019d rather be farming.\u201d<\/p>\n But people have no choice but to fish. Even though it\u2019s no longer providing enough. Even though it\u2019s hastening the decline of the reef and the source of income it provides.<\/p>\n Men pull beach seines through the water in Ambolimailaky.<\/p>\n Fishermen pull a net into their pirogue.<\/p>\n In the village of Ifaty, in the Bay of Ranobe, a man prepares freshly caught octopuses to be exported, likely overseas.<\/p>\n One morning, around the new moon, I went out on the water with a few fishermen at low tide. The water got deeper at first, but as we motored farther out, it became shallow again \u2014 until it was so shallow we could walk. We were on top of the barrier reef. It was a bizarre image: Here we were, in what felt like the middle of the ocean, standing in just a few inches of water.<\/p>\n During especially low tides, part of the reef here is exposed, and fishers \u2014 in this case, mainly women \u2014 take advantage of these conditions. They search the reef by foot for octopuses, urchins, and other critters to eat or sell, an approach known as gleaning.<\/p>\n At least a dozen women were gleaning when we arrived, their eyes fixed downward as they paced around. Some of them wielded spears, to stab octopuses, or large conch-like snail shells, which they use to crack open urchins.<\/p>\n A woman named Jophina Tiandrazana collects urchins at low tide in the Bay of Ranobe. She uses a snail shell to crack the urchins open and extract the meat inside.<\/p>\n I approached a woman named Doseline, who wore mismatched sneakers and a wide-brimmed hat. As we talked, she poked a spear under rocks in search of octopuses, occasionally pausing to grab a snail and put it in her bag.<\/p>\n Doseline told me she\u2019s catching half as many octopuses as she did 10 or 20 years ago. And while she knows gleaning can damage the coral \u2014 most of the exposed reef is already dead, in part because fishers sometimes crush corals under their feet or break them to grab hiding octopuses \u2014 she doesn\u2019t have a choice, she said. Doseline is the sole provider for her son, who\u2019s in school, she said. \u201cMy income [from fishing] is not enough,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n Doseline searches for octopuses on the reef in the Bay of Ranobe on September 22. Around the full and new moons, part of the reef is exposed, even though it\u2019s a few miles offshore.<\/p>\n Finding no octopuses, Doseline sails home in a pirogue with her granddaughter.<\/p>\n For more than an hour, I watched Doseline search the reef. We stepped over spiny red sea stars and a colorful slug called a nudibranch. I found discarded shells occupied by crabs that looked like creatures from another world. Doseline, who wore her hair in pigtails, didn\u2019t have much luck. \u201cI\u2019m sad because I didn\u2019t catch any octopuses, so I\u2019ll go back home,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n Over the last three decades, Madagascar has attracted an enormous amount of attention from international environmental groups and foreign donors. The island\u2019s wildlife is not only charismatic \u2014 lemurs! chameleons! coral reefs! \u2014 but also unique. Because Madagascar has been isolated from other land masses for millions of years, animals there have had plenty of time to evolve into new species. Today, around 90 percent of the country\u2019s plants and animals are found nowhere else on Earth. That means if you lose them in Madagascar, you lose them everywhere.<\/p>\n With so much to lose, major international environmental groups ranging from Conservation International<\/a> to WWF<\/a> have been working for years on the island to try to curb forest loss, overfishing, and other kinds of environmental harm. And aid organizations have funneled hundreds of millions<\/a> of dollars into Madagascar to help. Yet those threats are still getting worse, not better<\/a>.<\/p>\n A chameleon in a small nature reserve in Mangily.<\/p>\n A bed of branching corals in the lagoon of the Bay of Ranobe.<\/p>\n The main problem is poverty \u2014 the sheer demand put on the environment \u2014 which is closely linked to political unrest. But there are also serious problems with the traditional approach to conservation in Madagascar and other developing nations.<\/p>\n How I reported this story<\/p>\n In early September, just before political protests rocked Madagascar and the government collapsed, I flew from New York City to the capital, Antananarivo. It\u2019s roughly a 24-hour journey. I then took an internal flight to the southwestern city of Toliara, where I met photographer Garth Cripps.<\/p>\n Cripps and I stayed in the Bay of Ranobe for about a week, where we spent most of our time talking with fishers. They showed us a range of different fishing approaches, from spear fishing at night to \u201cgleaning\u201d \u2014 collecting sea creatures in the shallows at low tide. Drugged up on Dramamine, I saw a pretty incredible amount of sea life, though most of it was dead.<\/p>\n Cripps and I also went on three dives with Reef Doctor to see both natural and artificial reefs.<\/p>\n Toward the end of our trip, we met University of Toliara\u2019s marine research institute (IHSM) director Gildas Todinanahary in Sarodrano \u2014 a coastal village built atop a sandbar \u2014 and went snorkeling to see some natural reefs. Todinanahary then took us to IHSM\u2019s field station, nearby, where we talked about what is (and is not) working in marine conservation.<\/p>\n Much of our reporting was made possible thanks to a handful of Madagascar-based translators and ground support from Reef Doctor and staff at IHSM.<\/p>\n Historically, environmental groups, foreign scientists, and the government in Madagascar bet big on protected areas as a means to safeguard nature, such as parks, marine protected areas, and nature reserves. The Bay of Ranobe is, for example, technically part of an official marine protected area. But as research shows<\/a>, those protection schemes have done little to stop environmental harm.<\/p>\n \u201cThe conservation of our biodiversity through Madagascar protected areas\u2019 system for 30 years was a failure,\u201d Madagascar\u2019s former environmental minister, Baomiavotse Vahinala Raharinirina, said<\/a> in 2020.<\/p>\n According to several environmental and development researchers I spoke to, that\u2019s because parks often don\u2019t address the reasons why people exploit nature in the first place. In some cases, they also disproportionately burden women fishers by restricting access to areas for gleaning, as Merrill Baker-M\u00e9dard wrote in her book, Feminist Conservation: Politics and Power in Madagascar\u2019s Marine Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another challenge is that NGOs in Madagascar, and to an extent worldwide, are often more accountable to their donors than they are to the local community, according to Emma Gibbons, who runs Reef Doctor, a small nonprofit in the Bay of Ranobe. Donors tend to fund short-term projects and they face few consequences if projects don\u2019t actually help people or ecosystems, Gibbons said. These issues are especially pronounced in southern Madagascar, nicknamed<\/a> the \u201ccemetery of projects,\u201d because so many of those projects \u2014 from establishing solar water pumps to beekeeping<\/a> \u2014 have failed<\/a>.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s a chance of conservation working, it has to be owned or guided by the community, rooted in a deep understanding of the local culture, and aligned with what people want, said Gibbons, a British national who\u2019s lived in Madagascar for two decades. Fishermen here certainly want to safeguard the fishery \u2014 it\u2019s their livelihood, their survival \u2014 but they can\u2019t afford to lose their fishing grounds in the process. Food security takes priority. \u201cYou can\u2019t tell people not to eat,\u201d Gibbons said.<\/p>\n Emma Gibbons, executive director of the Malagasy NGO Reef Doctor.<\/p>\n It\u2019s this perspective that\u2019s informed the approach Gibbons is taking now. Instead of attempting to limit fishing as some traditional conservation has tried to do, she \u2014 along with members of the community and a team of local and foreign researchers \u2014 are trying to create more places to fish.<\/p>\n And to do that, they\u2019re essentially building new coral reefs from scratch in the Bay of Ranobe. \u201cOur hope is that we can increase the area that\u2019s available to fish,\u201d Gibbons said.<\/p>\n Layered, limestone structures called ARMS, shown here, are used to seed the artificial reefs with life from a natural reef.<\/p>\n Building artificial reefs is simpler than it sounds: She and her collaborators sink massive chunks of limestone offshore, forming long underwater rows of rocks that are each about 57 meters. That\u2019s roughly the length of a commercial airplane. They then \u201cseed\u201d those rocks with life using smaller constructions called autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS<\/a>) that have spent several months accumulating corals, sponges, and other marine organisms on a natural reef. Those structures, made of stacked stone plates, are basically coral reef starter packs.<\/p>\n So far, Reef Doctor has finished building two artificial reefs that cover about half an acre. Each of them has four rows of rocks, known as spurs, seeded with ARMS.<\/p>\n The sea was calm and more green than blue when I arrived by boat above one of the artificial reefs, about a mile from shore, with marine biologist Mark Little. He\u2019s studying microbes on the reef. The water was cloudy, so we could barely see the rocks below \u2014 not the most inviting conditions. But we strapped on tanks and plunged in.<\/p>\n As I sank down, the rows of rocks appeared dramatically through my foggy mask, as if I was descending on ruins of a lost city.<\/p>\n A young colony of branching coral growing from one of the ARMS on the artificial reef.<\/p>\n I swam up to a group of ARMS, from which fist-sized bits of coral sprouted like branches of a bonsai tree. Box fish, lionfish, and even young parrotfish \u2014 named for their bird-like beaks \u2014 crowded around them. At one point, a stingray appeared out of the murky beyond and passed right in front of me, before vanishing again. I was struck at that moment by the realization that we\u2019ve damaged our environment so badly that we literally have to rebuild ecosystems we depend on from scratch. At least in this case, that approach seems to be working.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s doing its job,\u201d said Little, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and Scripps Institute of Oceanography, when we were back in the boat. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of life.\u201d<\/p>\n The artificial reefs have already started attracting small schools of fish.<\/p>\n A close-up view of ARMS on top of a row of rocks at the artificial reef.<\/p>\n Over the next several years, a team<\/a> of local and foreign researchers will study the impact of the artificial reefs on marine life and the fishery here \u2014 and how that, in turn, affects the physical and mental health of people in nearby villages. The study is among the largest in the world to link ecosystem health to human health<\/a>, according to Chris Golden, a nutrition and global health researcher at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who\u2019s closely involved in the project.<\/p>\n The purpose of this study is \u201cto understand whether or not stewarding natural resources in this way can simultaneously benefit the ecosystem and benefit human nutrition and food security and human health,\u201d Golden said. \u201cWe want to quantify the way that interventions like this \u2014 an environmental intervention \u2014 could be viewed as a public health intervention.\u201d<\/p>\n I can\u2019t help but feel like it\u2019s just nowhere near enough. If the scale of fishing continues \u2014 or increases, as the coastal population swells \u2014 a few artificial reefs won\u2019t be able to rescue the fishery. Even scientists involved in the project understand the limitations. \u201cWithin the broader situation, it\u2019s not going to work,\u201d said Todinanahary, who works closely with Gibbons.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n