Bursts of laughter echo from a speedboard bobbing on the turquoise Mozambique channel, miles off the west coast of Madagascar. It's a sunny morning. The only land in view is a tiny islet of white sand. On the boat, Marco Tardelu, a skinny 33-year-old Malagasy man in an oversized wetsuit, cracks jokes as his teammates pull on their fins and rinse their rubber masks and snorkels, preparing to freedive to the coral reef 25 feet below.
"This guy can free dive down to [65 feet]," he says, grinning as he taps his friend Gervais Hamilson on the back.
The six men are fishermen from Madagascar's Vezo tribe, known to have exceptional diving skills. Their task today is to survey the health of a coral reef in the Barren Isles, an archipelago of nine islands about 25 miles off Madagascar.
One by one, they jump off the boat, disappearing underwater with barely a ripple. Below, among the colorful fish darting between vibrant coral formations, Hamilson swims along noting the marine species he encounters on a white writing slate. Others from the team inspect the corals and identify the sediments and plants on the sea floor. About four long minutes pass before they resurface, calmly refilling their lungs through their snorkels.
This daily dive is part of a wider conservation project to protect the Barren Isles, which have become a refuge for thousands of Vezo people. Over the past two decades they've migrated here from other parts of Madagascar, after overfishing and climate change began to threaten their traditional way of life. Some have migrated permanently, while others stay only for the best fishing months.
But even here in the Barren Isles, the Vezo are starting to see a worrying decline in fish numbers. According to data collected by Blue Ventures, a British nonprofit working on global marine conservation, the catch has nearly halved between 2015 and 2023, dropping from 48 pounds of fish per person per outing to 26 pounds.
Gervais Hamilson has witnessed this degradation firsthand as a diver and fisherman. "The ocean is our life," he says, "we have nowhere else to go if our resources dry up. Our Vezo culture could disappear."
Known as Madagascar's "sea nomads," Vezo people have followed fish migrations along the Mozambique Channel for centuries. However, Madagascar is ranked as one of the world's most climate-vulnerable countries and a hotspot for illegal and unregulated fishing. Much of the sea life the Vezo subsist on is getting scarce, from tuna and shrimp to invertebrates known as sea cucumbers.
Fishing fleets hailing mostly from East Asia and Europe are plundering the southwest Indian Ocean, which spans from Kenya to the South African coast and includes Madagascar's waters. According to the World Wildlife Fund, illegal tuna and shrimp fishing costs the region about $143 million every year — with Madagascar alone losing over $35 million annually. And local poaching often causes a "boom and bust" phenomenon as poachers chase lucrative species such as sharks and sea cucumbers, which have become popular in East Asia.
"Vezo fishermen are hard hit by these changes," says Dr. Gildas Todinanahary, a senior lecturer at Madagascar's University of Toliara's Fishery and Marine Science Institute.
Climate change only adds to the problem, he says. Rising ocean temperatures, unpredictable fishing seasons, degraded marine habitats and "increasingly scattered and less abundant" fish stocks are "forcing the Vezo to travel further from their home villages to find fish."
When the Vezo of the Barren Isles began to see fish decline in their safe haven, they organized to take action. In 2014, with the help of Blue Ventures, many islanders formed a fishermen's collective. Their ambitious goal is to transform the Barren Isles into a 1,660-square-mile Marine Protected Area (MPA), a globally recognized status designed to conserve marine biodiversity, which they would co-manage.
If the proposal is endorsed by the Malagasy government, the Barren Isles would gain permanent protective status. That would safeguard the archipelago from industrial fishing and oil/gas extraction while allowing traditional small-scale fishing practices to continue in designated areas.
Fisheries researcher Samantha Farquhar, a Ph.D. candidate at East Carolina University, has studied the Barren Isles and says a locally managed MPA with reserved fishing rights for the local Vezo community is an "excellent" idea.
"But I don't know if it could be enforced effectively," she adds, pointing to Madagascar's limited coast guard resources. This only makes the buy-in of the local community more important.
In early 2023 the fishermen's collective and Blue Ventures announced they would select a small team of "ocean monitors" to conduct underwater surveys and get communities invested in the conservation work. Gervais Hamilson jumped at the opportunity to join the team. While some conservation efforts have been criticized for sidelining locals, here the Vezo people are at the center of the efforts to defend the Barren Isles; Hamilson says: "We want to leave a legacy for our children."
Hamilson grew up playing among the reefs on these islands, where daily life revolves around the ocean. When fishermen return to shore in the early morning, villagers gather on the beach to help cut, clean and salt the night's haul. Strings of fish glisten as they dry in the sun. Colorful traditional wooden outrigger canoes called pirogues line the beach where men spend hours mending their nets. Children play or practice spearfishing for octopus in the shallow seagrass beds.
Hamilson's grandparents migrated to the Barren Isles in the 1980s, up from Madagascar's southwestern coast where the mollusks they used to harvest and sell started dwindling. When Hamilson was growing up on the islands, he says he could see schools of fish from the shore and sea life was abundant. In recent years, sea cucumbers — which are sold as a delicacy in southeast Asia — have become more lucrative, bringing in far more money than fish.
Hamilton remembers when they "could be gathered just by walking through the shallow waters." Now, he has to dive ever deeper to find them, harvesting about 20 sea cucumbers a day when he says he once found over a hundred.
As sea life off the coast of mainland Madagascar has declined even faster, many fishermen and their families choose to make the long journey to the Barren Isles. Every April, Netson Kassim and his family pack a few belongings into his narrow pirogue, hoist the patched sails and embark on the perilous week-long, 350-mile crossing. They only return home to southwest Madagascar when the four-month cyclone season begins in December.
Kassim says they make this journey because the waters back home have been plundered by overfishing and poachers equipped with scuba diving gear, which is illegal under Madagascar's fisheries law.
"In the past our boats were full, but now the sea cucumbers are found only in deep waters, beyond our reach as freedivers," he says.
Here in the Barren Isles, Kassim has set up a plastic tarp tent to create a temporary home for his wife and young son on this tiny sandbar surrounded by turquoise waters known as Manandra Island.
Living conditions leave much to be desired: Manandra Island is so small that it regularly disappears underwater during spring tides, forcing islanders to climb onto platforms made of driftwood and wait for the water to recede. Yet for Kassim and his family, the island is a lifeline.
"Here, we can still find sea cucumbers on the coral reefs," he says.
But when asked about creating a Marine Protected Area Kassim expresses concern: "If all areas around the island become protected, then there won't be anywhere for us to fish."
It's a common misunderstanding of how the conservation project would work, says Gervais Hamilson. The Vezo would still be allowed to fish many spots within the protected area. He says getting all communities on board is key to the success of the project.
Late one afternoon, on neighboring Maraontaly Island, the ocean monitors team sit under a tree with dozens of villagers to present the findings of their underwater surveys and discuss conservation efforts. They want to establish small, locally recognized and protected reserves to start conserving marine life now, since the MPA political process may take some time. Today the ocean monitors are aiming to get buy-in to create a reserve on one of the reefs to protect fish breeding cycles.
"Our reef here on Maraontaly island is still healthy," team member Alain Manolas tells the other fishermen, "but it's also our responsibility to protect this ecosystem so we can continue to benefit from it."
While the surveys show the coral and seagrass are still healthy, the community worries about dwindling fish stocks after several bad seasons.
"We're all suffering from the change of climate," Robustin tells the crowd. Like many people in Madagascar, Robustin doesn't have a surname. He was one of the first Vezo born on the Barren Isles and is the vice president of the fishermen's collective on the archipelago.
"In 2015, we had so much fish that we sometimes couldn't carry it all to shore. But in 2023, there were months we could only go out to fish twice."
Some of the fishermen in attendance worry that conservation restrictions could impact their fishing. But Robustin disagrees: "[Foreign] industrial boats still fish here because we don't have protected areas," he says.
Hamilson listens as the debate carries on into the night. Eventually, the community agrees to establish a small reserve on the reef the team selected to protect habitat for fish to reproduce.
Blue Ventures has submitted the application for Marine Protected Area status to Madagascar's National Environment Office, which will conduct an environmental impact assessment before submitting it for final evaluation to the Ministry of Environment.
"The will is there to make it happen," says the nonprofit's project coordinator Graham Ragan. Still, due to bureaucratic hurdles, the process could take between a few months to several years. As a result, these small steps forward involving the local community are important interim protection actions.
The next day, the team will head to another island to meet with villagers there. "People see us being involved in conservation, and it inspires them to join," Hamilson says.
This project was funded by the European Journalism Centre, through the Solutions Journalism Accelerator. The Accelerator is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a funder of NPR and this blog.
Julie Bourdin is a freelance journalist based in South Africa. She covers human rights and climate-related stories across Africa and Europe. She's trudged through abandoned mines, dived in Cape Town's icy waters and flown over Lesotho's mountain Kingdom.
Sira Thierij is an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Dakar, Senegal. She covers stories related to human rights, conflict and climate change in Africa and beyond. Her documentaries, TV and radio reports have won multiple awards.
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