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Keith Davis: He was protecting the oceans — and then he disappeared

author:Taotao BBC
Keith Davis: He was protecting the oceans — and then he disappeared

Keith Davis disappeared at sea thousands of miles from home. His body was never found. Now, the mystery of his death has illuminated a marine world that is largely hidden from sight, Writes Rachel Monroe.

At my local grocery store in Texas, I can buy a can of tuna for less than a dollar. But, like many things that look cheap, these low prices are possible because dangerous and largely invisible jobs happen far away – jobs that most of us will never know about.

Davis is an idealistic and adventurous ukulele player from Arizona who works to make the invisible world of commercial tuna fishing visible. He may have paid the price for it.

"He was very impulsive, very romantic, flying over the seat of his pants," said Anik Clemens, a friend and colleague of hiss. "He's passionate about what he's doing. He wants to protect the oceans, he wants to protect fishermen and their industries.

In 2015, during a seemingly routine voyage aboard Victoria 168, the 41-year-old disappeared hundreds of miles off the coast of Ecuador.

The crew searched the ship but found no sign of him. As news of his disappearance reached his friends and colleagues on the mainland, many immediately became suspicious.

"He has 16 years of service. There's no doubt in my opinion that he's as professional as anyone, as careful and safe as possible," said Bubacuk, a friend of Davis's and West-Central Pacific Tuna Program Manager at the World Wildlife Fund.

"The inevitable conclusion is that something must have happened to him. To this day, I'm sure he saw something that the people on that ship didn't want him to see.

Searching for his disappearance for a new BBC podcast, I entered a fascinating world.

Davis, a marine biologist who worked as a fisheries observer, is a little-known profession that offers both great adventures and, in some cases, great risks. An estimated 2,500 observers are our eyes and ears on the ocean. They live on fishing boats for months at a time, venturing hundreds of miles offshore to protect these waters from overfishing and to gather scientific observations that help us understand the health of the ocean and marine life.

Observers live among the crew and work the same hard hours in the same harsh conditions. But they are also sometimes suspicious because part of their job is to report illegal activities.

But what could Davis have witnessed that might put him in danger? The legal jurisdiction of the high seas is complex and poorly monitored, and they are known for illegal activities, namely trafficking in drugs and weapons and sometimes even trafficking in human beings. To be clear, however, we have yet to see any evidence that Davis witnessed any of these activities aboard Victoria 168.

The ship he was working on at the time of his disappearance was engaged in so-called transshipment.

Keith Davis: He was protecting the oceans — and then he disappeared

Keith Davis is passionate about his work, says friend Anik Clemens.

The transshipment vessel provides fresh supplies to longline tuna vessels and transports freshly caught fish back to shore. This process can allow some tuna longliners to stay at sea for years at once, which helps save costs — and makes possible the 99-cent canned tuna I find on grocery store shelves.

Observers who witness illegal activities are in a very vulnerable position. While Davis was working on the Victoria 168, his only means of communication with shore was through the captain's computer.

People who do his work are sometimes trained to speak in code in case they see something that's too sensitive to say aloud. While Davis enjoyed being an observer, he was also acutely aware of the dangers of the job. "Many of us who have served in the military have witnessed gun activity, knife fighting, slavery ... Most of that we have to swallow as 'part of the job,'" he wrote on Facebook a year before his disappearance.

More worryingly, Davis's presumed death was not an isolated incident. Some observers have disappeared or died in mysterious circumstances – two more incidents in the months we were making the podcast.

  • Communities fighting overfishing

Most of these cases are far less visible than Davis. That's because many observers aren't adventurous American men like Davis, but Pacific Islanders dedicated to providing for their families. They often come from communities with a long history of artisanal fishing – a localized industry that, in many cases, has been disrupted by the invasion of a global fishing fleet that relies on transshipment.

When people like Charlie Lasisi, an observer from Papua New Guinea, or Eritara Aati Kaierua from Kiribas, died in suspicious circumstances, they didn't make headlines. But it is observers like these who bear the brunt of our desire to buy cheap tuna.

Davis' body remains unidentified. The investigation by Panamanian authorities and the FBI is inconclusive.

"While we found that there was a lack of solutions to what happened in Keith, there was little we could do beyond that," his employer, MRAG Americas, said in a statement. "We will continue our efforts to provide maximum security for observers deployed at sea and on land."

Gilontas Group, the owner of Victoria 168, declined to comment on the case, which remains technically open, noting that "the Girontas Group has cooperated with the authorities conducting the investigation".

Officially, we don't know if Davis died accidentally, committed suicide, or was killed. But what we do know is that most of the illegal activity that happens at sea relies on the idea that being far from the coast, without cell phone signals or security cameras, is largely invisible to those of us on the mainland.

Keith Davis: He was protecting the oceans — and then he disappeared

Victoria 168, Davis disappeared a few days later

The work of observers, witnessing what is happening at sea, makes them vulnerable.

"Observers are not supported by fisheries. They don't have institutional support. They don't get the support of employers, contractors. In the end, they are alone," said Liz Mitchell, former president of the Professional Observer Association.

But in the course of my reporting, I've found that a lot of people are trying to shed light on this invisible world.

Factories turn West African fish into powder

For more than a decade, WWF's Bubba Cook has been tracking deaths that observers can't explain. "One of the bigger problems is that we just don't know how many observers have gone missing," he said. "Right here in the Pacific, there's about one observer a year. And that's just because we started recording. How many people had died at sea under various circumstances or never returned home before that? ”

There is also the Global Fisheries Watch Map, an open access tool that shows the locations of more than 65,000 shipping vessels from 2012 to date.

By following the stories of Keith Davis, Charlie, and Eritara, and by understanding what's happening on the high seas, we can make observers, crews, and oceans safer.

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