Fishing

The annual fishing ban is set to begin on April 15 and will continue till Sept 1, as fishermen who have already anchored their boats start preparations for the forthcoming season, repairing ripped nets and carrying out boat maintenance.

A few days prior to the start of the fishing ban, fishermen say this season has not been productive, while an expert attributes the decrease in the species in Marmara to overfishing and pollution.

"There is still no official act on the basis of which the Bulgarian fishing vessels are detained, and this raises serious concerns," Deputy Minister of Agriculture Georgi Sabev told journalists in Balchik during a meeting with the fishermen whose vessels were detained at the port in Constanta.

Millions of fish have washed up dead in southeastern Australia in a die-off that authorities and scientists say is caused by depleted oxygen levels in the river after recent floods and hot weather.

Residents of the Outback town of Menindee in New South Wales state complained of a terrible smell from the dead fish.

Millions of dead and rotting fish have clogged a vast stretch of river near a remote town in the Australian outback as a searing heatwave sweeps through the region.

Videos posted to social media showed boats ploughing through a blanket of dead fish smothering the water, with the surface barely visible underneath.

Illustration. BIRN/Igor Vujcic

Major players in global shipping, the Laskaridis brothers are known in Greece for their initiatives to clean the seas of rubbish and scrap single-use plastics.

Fines of more than 37 million Turkish Liras ($2.1 million) were given during inspections for illegal fishing, while 480 tons of fishery products and 169 ships without fishing licenses were confiscated in 2022, the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry has announced.

The ministry stated that 199,702 inspections were carried out against illegal fishing last year.

A member of Derindere Respect Diving Group, who wanted to protest the fishing in the Bosporus and draw attention to the pollution in the seas, took plastic fish out of the sea by diving in a Santa Claus outfit.

The diver wearing a Santa Claus outfit collected plastic fish from the bottom of the sea to raise awareness about the sea pollution and fishing policies in the Bosporus.

A man diving into the Dardanelles has caught a 1.7-meter (5.5-feet) long leerfish weighing 50 kilograms (110 lb) with a harpoon.

Çetin Ege Doğan, who is engaged in freediving as a hobby, set out to sea to catch fish that can rarely be caught in the Dardanelles.

Diving to a depth of 20 meters, Doğan caught leerfish weighing 50 kilograms and 1.7 meters long.

Within the scope of the "Ghost Net Hunting Marmara" project, 12,000 square meters of abandoned fishing nets have been collected from the Maramara Sea in just one year, the project coordinator has said but warned that even if the efforts continue for the next four months, it won't be enough to entirely clear the sea of discarded nets.