Using explosives is illegal, wasteful and devastating to marine life and people’s livelihoods. Yet in Sri Lanka and around the world it’s thriving as a quick and easy route to a lucrative haul
The immediate aftermath of a blast is obvious, says Wilson Perera: the ocean turns murky with blood and is strewn with fish that are missing eyes or other organs. Those fish that are wounded swim off to die elsewhere. Their carcasses wash ashore days later.
“Everything within a 100-metre radius of the blast is destroyed – coral reefs, marine plants and animals,” says Perera.
Perera is a fisher and supplier in Salpayaru, a picturesque fishing village near the city of Trincomalee on the north-eastern coast of Sri Lanka. He says the ocean here teemed with marine life until an increase in blast fishing began destroying its bounty.
Blast fishing, an illegal method in which dynamite or other explosives are used to kill or stun fish, takes place around the world, from South America to Asia and Africa to Europe. According to one study there were 850,000 blast fishing incidents recorded between 2006-2016 in Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Philippines alone.
The sound “echoes like a bomb blast” if near the surface, Perera says, or can be nearly silent if targeting deeper fish, where the explosives are first tied to rocks or chunks of iron.
Though illegal in Sri Lanka, the practice thrives across the island with a variety of explosives such as gelignite, watergel sticks and detonators, often smuggled from stone quarries. Between 2019 and 2023, the Sri Lankan navy said it seized 18 gelignite sticks, 12,570 watergel sticks and 3,073 detonators, but that many more slip through.
Blast fishing has clear economic advantages in the short term. Perera explains it requires only two or three people, as opposed to up to 25 fishers working together to use a beach seine, a traditional form of fishing in which a net operated from the coast surrounds an area of shallow water. With just a boat, an engine, a few dynamite capsules and an oxygen cylinder for the diver, blast fishers can get about 100kg of fish at the snap of a finger, he says.
But blasting also hurts fishers who use traditional methods, such as outboard motor (OBM) fishing and beach seine. The explosions kill juveniles and eggs, which Perera claims is contributing to declining stocks. Dynamite use also blocks schools of fish from reaching the shore, further affecting the beach seiners.
“An entire generation [of fishers] will be destitute [because of blast fishing],” he says.