Robbing a bank when no one’s looking

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The most important place on earth that virtually no one has ever heard of is called the Saya de Malha Bank. Among the world’s largest seagrass fields and the planet’s most important carbon sinks, this high-seas patch of ocean covers an area the size of Switzerland. More than 200 miles from land, the submerged bank is situated in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Seychelles.

It has been called the world’s largest invisible island as it is formed by a massive plateau, in some spots barely hidden under 30-feet of water, offering safe haven to an unprecedented biodiversity of seagrass habitats for turtles and breeding grounds for sharks, humpback and blue whales. 

Researchers say that the bank is one of the least scientifically studied areas of the planet partly because of its remoteness. The area’s unpredictable depths have also meant that, over the centuries, merchant ships and explorers tended to avoid these waters.

It has long been the type of fantastical realm so uncharted that on the old maps, it would be designated, “Here Be Monsters.” More recently, though, the bank is traversed by a diverse cast of characters, including shark finners, bottom trawlers, seabed miners, stranded fishers, starving crews, wealthy yachters, and libertarian seasteaders. 

The tragedy, however, is that since the Saya de Malha Bank is mostly located in international waters, where few rules apply, its biodiversity is being systematically decimated by a huge fleet of industrial fishing ships that remain largely unchecked by government oversight.

The bank remains unprotected by any major binding treaties largely due to an anemia of political will by national authorities and a profits-now costs-later outlook of fishing interests. The question now: who will safeguard this public treasure?

Mowing down an ecosystem

The Saya de Malha Bank is so existentially crucial to the planet because it is one of the world’s biggest seagrass meadows and thus carbon sinks. Much like trees on land, seagrass absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in its roots and soil. But seagrass does it especially fast — at a rate 35 times that of tropical rainforest. What makes the situation in the Saya de Malha Bank even more urgent is that it’s being systematically decimated by a multinational fleet of fishing ships that virtually no one tracks or polices.

More than 500 years ago, when Portuguese sailors came across a shallow-water bank on the high seas over 700 miles east of the northern tip of Mauritius, they named it Saya de Malha, or “mesh skirt,” to describe the rolling waves of seagrass below the surface.

In 2012, UNESCO considered Saya de Malha as a potential candidate to become a Marine World Heritage site, for its “Potential Outstanding Universal Value.” UNESCO described the bank as “globally unique,” concluding that it was covered in what is likely the largest seagrass meadow in the world. 

BANK. The Saya de Malha bank, which means ‘mesh skirt’ in Portuguese, was named to describe the rolling waves of seagrass just below the surface. It is part of the Mascarene Plateau in the Indian Ocean and is one of the largest submerged banks in the world. Photo from James Michel Foundation

Seagrasses are frequently overlooked because they are rare, estimated to cover only a tenth of one percent of the ocean floor. “They are the forgotten ecosystem,” said Ronald Jumeau, the Seychelles Ambassador for Climate Change. Nevertheless, seagrasses are far less protected than other offshore areas. Only 26% of recorded seagrass meadows fall within marine protected areas, compared with 40% of coral reefs and 43% of the world’s mangroves. 

Often described as the lungs of the ocean, seagrasses capture about a fifth of all its carbon and they are home to vast biodiversity. Thousands of species, including in the Saya de Malha Bank, many as yet unknown to science, depend on seagrasses for their survival. But the planet has lost roughly a third of them since the late nineteenth century and we lose 7% more each year — roughly equivalent to losing a football pitch of seagrass every 30 minutes. 

Seagrass also cleans polluted water and protects coastlines from erosion, according to a 2021 report by the University of California, Davis. At a time when at least eight million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, seagrass traps microplastics by acting as a dense net, catching debris and locking it into the sediment, found a 2021 study in Nature.

At a time when ocean acidification threatens the survival of the world’s coral reefs and the thousands of fish species that inhabit them, seagrasses reduce acidity by absorbing carbon through photosynthesis, and provide shelters, nurseries, and feeding grounds for thousands of species, including endangered animals such as dugongs, sharks, and seahorses. 

But the Saya de Malha is under threat. More than 200 distant-water vessels — most of them from Sri Lanka and Taiwan — have parked in the deeper waters along the edge of the bank over the past few years to catch tuna, lizardfish, scad and forage fish that is turned into protein-rich fishmeal, a type of animal feed.

Ocean conservationists say that efforts to conserve the bank’s sea grass are not moving fast enough to make a difference. “It’s like walking north on a southbound train,” Heidi Weisel, director of the International Union of Nature Ocean Team in North America. 

On May 23, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to declare March 1 as World Seagrass Day. The resolution was sponsored by Sri Lanka. Speaking at the assembly, the Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN, Ambassador Mohan Pieris, said seagrasses were “one of the most valuable marine ecosystems on earth,” highlighting, among other things, their outsized contribution to carbon sequestration.

But recognition is one thing; action is another. As the ambassador gave his speech in New York, dozens of ships from his country’s fishing fleet were 9,000 miles away, busily scraping the biggest of those very ecosystems he was calling on the world to protect. – Rappler.com

Reporting and writing was contributed additionally by Outlaw Ocean Project staff, including Maya Martin, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan, Ben Blankenship, and Austin Brush.