New research from the Monterey Bay Aquarium finds that historical tortoiseshell trade routes may have established the groundwork for modern illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The study published in the journal Science Advances, “The historical development of complex global trafficking networks for marine wildlife,” analyses 150 years of tortoiseshell trade records and derives several realistic harvest models to explore the trade of endangered hawksbill sea turtles.
The study concludes that the tortoiseshell trade networks concentrated in Southeast Asia harvested nine million turtles, more than six times previous estimates.