Cyanide fishing has been a practice in the Phillipines since the 1960's but it has spread in the last decade to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, the Solomon Islands, and Vietnam. The practice is simple but devastating.
Fishers mix cyanide into squirt bottles with sea water.
They then dive down to the reefs attached to air hoses, squirt cyanide into crevices where certain species of fish hide and then remove the chemically stunned fish by hand. The half of the fish caught that do not die from cyanide poisoning are immobilized for a couple of hours, and after they revive they are sold live to restaurants in major Asian cities or pet retailers in North America and Europe as aquarium fish. But the thousands of kilograms of cyanide released into the reefs every year takes a toll. The chemical is fatal not only to many of the target fish, but also to dozens of species that live in and around the reefs. While the extent to which cyanide has contributed to the worldwide destruction of the coral reefs is not known, studies have shown that even limited exposure to sodium cyanide can completely kill reef based life.