Todd Woody, writing for Quartz:
In a first of its kind study released today, scientists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver used Google Earth images to calculate how much fish was actually caught by Persian Gulf nations compared to what they reported. The result: The official numbers are nothing but one big fish tale. Researchers Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak and Daniel Pauly estimated the fish catch in 2005, for instance, was 31,433 tonnes, six times what nations bordering the Persian Gulf reported. “Our results document the unreliability of catch data from the Persian Gulf, a small part of a global misreporting problem,” the authors write in the study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.