Terms - Env and Ecology

Blast Fishing

• Blast fishing or dynamite fishing is the practice of using explosives to stun or kill schools of fish for easy collection. This often illegal practice can be extremely destructive to the surrounding ecosystem, as the explosion often destroys the underlying habitat (such as coral reefs) that supports the fish.


• Researchers believe that destructive fishing practices like blast fishing to be one of the biggest threat to the coral reef ecosystems. Blown up coral reefs are no more than rubble fields.


• Coral reefs are less likely to recover from constant disturbance such as blast fishing than from small disturbance that does not change the physical environment. Blast fishing destroys the calcium carbonate coral skeletons and is one of the continual disruptions of coral reefs