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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

This isn't Bermuda Triangle kind of vanishing it's about predominantly Chinese vessels going offline to avoid being tracked.

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I remember reading back in 2020 about this tiny satellite startup. They are being used by the Galapagos islands to track Chinese fishing boats.

https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/satellite-data-nails-c...

I was disappointed to discover that too -- they're not "vanishing," they're intentionally going offline. Borderline clickbait.

From the article:

> Oceana documented over 800 foreign vessels logging more than 900,000 total hours of apparent fishing. The analysis also revealed that 69% of this fishing activity was conducted by more than 400 Chinese vessels.

...

> As part of this analysis, Oceana documented more than 6,000 gap events, instances where AIS transmissions are not detected for more than 24 hours, which potentially indicates vessels are disabling their public tracking devices. These vessels were invisible for more than 600,000 total hours, hiding fishing vessel locations and masking potentially illegal behavior, such as crossing into Argentina’s national waters to fish. The Chinese fleet was responsible for 66% of these incidents.

It appears that Chinese vessels are actually slightly less likely to disable AIS than others?

Edit: from the actual report at the end of the article, which I missed at first:

> While China had the highest total number of gaps, the Spanish fleet appeared to have the worst AIS compliance on a per-vessel basis. Nine out of the 10 fishing vessels that spent the most time with their AIS off were flagged to Spain, despite constant AIS operation being mandatory under European Union law.

I wonder whether that means they can be sued, or whether the responsible regulatory agency would have to take the initiative.

Just over 50% of the vessels were responsible for 66% of the gap events - that makes them more likely doesn't it?

I was basing it on 69% of fishing time vs. 66% of gaps. Of course it could just be that their average gap is longer. That statistic is unfortunately missing even from the full report, although they must have it if they were able to identify the ten vessels with the longest gaps.

That’s kind of missing the point. There were 400 Chinese vessels turning off their AIS to illegally fish. Even if they were turning them off less frequently, the sheer numbers are far more damaging than 9 Spanish ships.

When you have that many vessels you don’t need to turn them off as much because you’re catching everything that moves in a far shorter period of time.

The relative prevalence is relevant if you want effective regulations. If the EU requirement for constant AIS transmissions is ineffective, then it's unlikely that political pressure on the Chinese government would result in a more effective policy. If, however, the owners of those Spanish vessels are fined enough to force them to end their illegal fishing, then there's hope that introducing similar regulations in China would also effectively curb illegal fishing by Chinese vessels.

Aside: There were actually 316 Chinese vessels with gaps in AIS transmission, 71 Taiwanese, 36 South Korean, 27 Spanish, 5 Argentine and 5 unknown ones.

Thanks, thought I was about to read up on a ship breaking kraken or some rogue anti-fishery org.

Yea, the title is incredibly misleading

As a very light reading of the article will tell.

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