A glimpse into the people, places, technology, and fieldwork behind Ocean Agent. From surveillance trials and marine operations to offshore passages and coastal communities, each image reflects a piece of the work to protect and better understand our oceans.
Kerkennah is more than an island. It is an ancestral relationship with the sea.
For generations, families have practiced Charfia, a traditional fishing method built around palm fronds, tides, patience, and intimate knowledge of the coast. It harvests from the sea without bulldozing the habitat beneath it. This is part of my Tunisian heritage, and part of why small-scale fisheries
matter so deeply to me.
But just offshore, another kind of fishing is reshaping the Gulf of Gabès.
Locally known as kiss trawling, illegal bottom trawling drags weighted nets across shallow seabeds, tearing through seagrass habitat, capturing juvenile fish and destroying the very nursery grounds that future fisheries depend upon. The contrast could hardly be sharper: one fishing tradition works with the ecosystem; the other strips away its foundation.
The warning signs are difficult to ignore. Since the 1970s, the Gulf of Gabès has lost much of its once-vast Posidonia oceanica seagrass habitat. Illegal small-mesh trawling can generate extraordinary levels of bycatch, while the number of unauthorized trawlers operating from areas such as Sfax has continued to grow.
And the people who pay the price are often the small-scale fishers.
Artisanal vessels make up the overwhelming majority of Tunisia’s fishing fleet, yet they must compete with illegal operators capable of removing far more fish, far more quickly, while damaging the habitat everyone depends upon. When public subsidies, weak enforcement, or regulatory loopholes allow that imbalance to continue, the problem is no longer simply illegal fishing. It becomes a failure of fisheries governance.
This is not only an environmental loss. It is an economic and cultural one.
If Tunisia wants healthy fisheries tomorrow, protecting the Gulf of Gabès today must mean enforcing existing rules, protecting seagrass habitat, supporting legitimate small-scale fishers, and making illegal trawling economically difficult rather than quietly profitable.
My father’s sea is part of this story.
The question is whether future generations will inherit a living Gulf of Gabès, or only stories about what once grew beneath the surface.
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