Vast blooms of jellyfish are appearing off Myanmar’s southern coast for the first time in six years, delighting hard-pressed fishing communities exporting to Thailand, but soaring costs and unfair trade terms sting.
Blooms of jellyfish, the most abundant in six years, have returned to the coast of Tanintharyi Region in far-southern Myanmar and the fishers are out on their boats day and night, battery-powered torches on their heads, catching thousands.
The swarms this season were first seen more than two months ago, on December 10. Fishing communities hope this “gift from God” will keep on giving for more weeks yet, making up for the hard times suffered in recent years because of a scarcity of their mainstay fish and shrimps.
“This year the jellyfish are plentiful. If we get a good price, then we could be wearing gold,” laughed 40-year-old Ko Toke Khae who normally uses his boat for crabbing, his skin worn dark brown by the sun. “This week I worked only four days and got K600,000 (US$290).”
Middlemen in Tanintharyi are paying as much as K200 per jellyfish – nearly 10 US cents at the official exchange rate – so fishers work around the clock, following the rhythms of the tides and moon, laying long cone-shaped nets from rafts or using double-hooked gaffs or even their bare hands.
The fishers mostly come from the islands and coastal settlements of southern Bokpyin Township. Some are from the villages of Mope Phyu Taung and Naung Soe Taung but more than two-thirds hail from Kyein Me Taung – Black Rattan Mountain – a village of some 4,000 people, according to resident and jellyfish trader U Tun Tun.
As welcome as this windfall is, villagers say they are still worse off than the last big jellyfish season of 2016-17. At the time, one jellyfish also fetched K200 but gold cost around K900,000 ($350) per tical (16.8 grams) while now the price is over K2.2 million ($770).
Back then, jellyfish catchers could earn enough to buy a tical of gold after working for only two weeks. Now they say that they can only hope to feed their families well and perhaps pay off some debts.