The Nest

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Rae Dawson: Thanks for tuning into The Nest, a podcast by the Martlet, the University of Victoria's independent newspaper. Settle in as we listen to Editor-in-Chief Sydney Lobe talk with UVic and greater Victoria community members about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how you can get involved. The Nest is produced in the studios of 101.9 FM CFUV radio, on the unceded lands of the Lekwungen peoples and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, whose relationship with the land continues to this day.

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Sydney Lobe: Welcome to the Nest. I’m Sydney Lobe and today I’m here with Teale Phelps Bondaroff. Teale is the director of research for volunteer-run marine conservation organization Oceans Asia, a research coordinator for the BC Humanist Association, a freelance researcher of international fisheries crime, chair and co-founder of Access BC, the campaign that fought for free contraception in BC, a former teacher, a Saanich councilor and the world leading expert on sea cucumber crime. Earlier this month, a Nanaimo man was convicted of the illegal harvest of sea cucumbers, which made national news and which Teale called a “real true crime story.” Today, he's here to talk about his research, marine conservation and this true crime story developing in British Columbia. We are so excited to welcome Teale to the Nest.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: It's great to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

Sydney Lobe: We're so happy to have you. So, I was hoping to start by talking a little bit about the humble sea cucumber kind of more generally, if that's okay with you.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Oh, let's dive in.

Sydney Lobe: Great. Yes, so you've called sea cucumbers the cornerstones of marine ecosystems, and I was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about what that means?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yeah. So, sea cucumbers are marine invertebrates. They are related to starfish, brittle stars, sea urchins and sea lilies. They have a pentaradial symmetry, they're echinoderms, and people have described this species as the earthworm of the sea. They play a really important role in marine ecosystems. There's around 1700 species that have been described around the world, and they range from 1.5 centimeters to about 1.8 meters. Effectively we're talking about the earthworms of the sea, and they’re a species not a lot of folks have heard about. But people out here in the West Coast will almost have certainly seen a sea cucumber if they visited the beach – I hope they’re getting to the beach every so often. If you see a splash of orange on the beach, there's a really strong chance that that is a sea cucumber out here in the West coast.

We've got two primary species that you're likely to see; the Orange Sea Cucumber, they tend to be sort of grouped around some of the purple stars in the intertidal area. And then if you go a little bit deeper, you'll often run into a Giant Sea Cucumber, or the Giant Red Sea Cucumber, and those are the larger red ones with spikes on them. And yeah, so these are really important species. One of my favorite expressions is that every grain of sand in the ocean has at one time passed through a sea cucumber. So they're providing really important services to ecosystems and obviously are really important members of ecosystems, for a wide range of reasons.

Sydney Lobe: Thank you. That's a really interesting expression. I mean, typically – I mentioned this to you earlier, I don't think very much about sea cucumbers, and I assume a lot of people don't either, but they're these hugely important parts of our marine ecosystems. So I'm really glad we get to chat a little bit more about that today.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yeah, and it's been an interesting journey getting into this issue. So I've been doing marine conservation for years and my organization, Oceans Asia, has done a lot of work on shark fins. So, folks who are listening along, if you've seen the documentary Seaspiracy on Netflix or Eli Roth's documentary Fin, those both feature our work in Sheung Wan in Hong Kong, looking at shark fins. And, a few years back I was talking to my colleagues – this was before the pandemic – and we were noting that we're making progress on shark fins. So, people of younger generations in Southeast Asia are less interested in eating shark fin soup and so you are seeing a decline in consumption. The Chinese Communist Party banned shark fin soup at banquets because it's considered a form of bribery – we're talking about $100 soup here.

And the conversation we had was, “What's next?” Like, where will the demand for luxury seafood products go if we were successful in reducing consumption for shark fins? And we kind of decided that it's not going to go away and it's likely to shift to the other treasures of Cantonese cuisine, which are shark fin, abalone, fish maw and sea cucumber – fish maw is swim bladder, the part of the fish that lets it go up and down in the water column. And there's been a lot of work done on shark fins, obviously. When it comes to abalone, there's been a ton of work done around connections with organized crime in South Africa, but no one is really talking about fish maw and sea cucumber – and no one was talking about sea cucumber. And so we started looking into it and kind of fell in love with the amazing creatures. And we've been working on that ever since and I've done now a ton of research and I can humbly say I’ve climbed the ladder to be the leading expert in the world – which I should say is a very achievable goal by the way. There's only eight to ten of us studying sea cucumber crime.

Sydney Lobe: *laughter* It's still very impressive.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: There's a small team of us, small but mighty.

Sydney Lobe: It's still very impressive, though. Yeah, thank you for that. That's great context. I was actually going to ask a little bit about how you ended up researching sea cucumbers, because you have such an expansive portfolio and you're a busy person with it seems like a lot of areas of interest. And that was great context as to how you kind of ended up researching sea cucumber specifically – but how did you end up interested in marine conservation?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: That's a really good question. So, I guess my journey would have begun when I was an undergraduate. I was raised by hippies, hence the name Teale, and I've always been passionate about protecting the environment. And, high school debate got me into politics – I've been doing politics in Canada for almost 20 years now. I think the first time I ran for Parliament was in 2006, back in Alberta for the NDP. Jack Layton tapped me on the shoulder to run out there. And it was interesting, I started studying radical political strategy of environmental groups, a tactic called “ecotage.” My undergraduate thesis looked at property destruction by environmental groups, this is back in the 90s and early 2000s, groups were firebombing and tree spiking. And spent a lot of time doing my undergraduate thesis explaining why I wasn't looking at groups working on the high seas, because it was a different political context. And then when I finished my thesis, my supervisors were like, “What do you do next?” And I was like, well, marine stuff sounds pretty cool.

And ended up doing my PhD on the political strategy of Sea Shepherd. Sea Shepherd is a marine conservation organization that, actually I’m, just working on a book chapter on their history. So, they have a very long history. They've been active for almost 50 years. And back in the 70s, they were sinking whaling boats and ramming them. Then they transitioned to stopping illegal whaling in the Southern Ocean in Antarctica. And I actually got – for my PhD I got to go on one of their ships and sail around Antarctica, preventing whaling from Japanese vessels. And then now they're currently cooperating with countries, mostly with Africa, doing marine patrols stopping illegal fishing. So I studied this group for many years and part of the reason was just because things on the high seas are different. It's a different theater for actors to operate in. And it was just, you know, fascinating stuff. They say if you're going to do a PhD, you should pick a topic that you could study for years and I've now been studying Sea Shepherd for 20 years.

And as a result, it exposed me to a lot of marine issues and a lot of folks working in marine conservation. And after I finished my PhD, ended up talking to a colleague in Europe, and they asked me to write a report. Actually, they asked me to write a three page blog on illegal fishing and its connection with organized crime. And because I'm very long winded, as people will soon realize, I'm putting like a 65 to 80 page report on the nexus between illegal fishing and organized crime, and then kind of entered that world of studying wildlife crime on the high seas. And I've been doing that ever since. So it's kind of partly a passion for protecting the world, but also when you look at the issues that are challenging our environment these days, there's a lot of them and they're very big and they're very scary.

I find that if we want to be able to make a difference as individuals and small grassroots campaigns or organizations, it's really difficult to be like, “Our small grassroots campaign of five people is going to solve climate change!” That's very ambitious. You might find yourself being very disappointed in your ability to achieve that outcome very quickly. Instead, the approach I like to take is we'll break this big issue down into smaller bite sized chunks. And so, in a sense, protecting the environment, one of the areas that's been very much neglected is wildlife crime. And within the realm of wildlife crime, marine wildlife crime is completely neglected. When people think of wildlife crime, they think of elephants and tigers, and maybe they'll think of shark fins and whaling. People don't think about these obscure species and animals like sea cucumbers, caterpillar fungus, blue spiders. There's a whole wide range of species that are trafficked, and not a lot of people realize that.

But the great thing about doing conservation for these species is that the people who are trafficking them are not very smart and organized. Like if someone is trafficking in heroin or guns or people, they have high security: shark fin, ivory. They're watching their back. But a lot of the criminals who are trafficking in less well known species sort of trade in the fact that most people have never heard of these things. And as a result, when you're going through customs you have a suitcase full of fish maw, it's like, “Oh, it's a couple of pieces of fish for my grandmother.” Well, little do the border security know that one piece of fish maw can sell for $96,000. And so this person is laundering money and traveling around the world with large values of money.

And so as a result, you can do kind of a catch up effect. So, when you're doing conservation on less well-known species, you can make a huge impact quite quickly just by simply letting people know that this is an issue.

Sydney Lobe: Yeah. Thank you. That's really helpful background and really, really interesting. And kind of off of that, you sort of touched on this a little bit already, but from what I understand, people illegally fish in general to avoid conservation or management guidelines and also avoid costs associated with legal fishing. And also, like you just mentioned, because it can be quite lucrative. But for those who might not know, why harvest sea cucumbers specifically?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yeah, great question. So as you said, illegal fishing and a lot of wildlife crime is fueled by greed. Also poverty, you know, you see relatively poor fishers being exploited by middle people – and I should say middlemen because it's almost always men. And so there's a lot of exploitation, and we're always trying to draw that balance. When we're supporting law enforcement in busting up these networks, we want to wind up the networks from the top. We'd rather not punish poor fishers who are just trying to sell a bucket full of sea cucumbers to get by.

But the reason why people fish for sea cucumbers, the primary two uses for sea cucumbers are as a food, a luxury seafood item, and also as a form of Traditional Chinese Medicine. And so those are the two main approaches. And when it comes to TCM or Traditional Chinese Medicine, people are using it for a wide range of cultural reasons. It's described as salty and warm, and people might use sea cucumber for heart, kidney and impotence and urination issues. But as a luxury seafood item, I think that's mostly the primary consumption. And that would be – I think a lot of people don't quite realize this sort of, the flex culture that exists around banqueting in some cultures. And if you're serving, you know, a meal, you want to serve something that's really valuable to show off your wealth and opulence. It’s conspicuous consumption and often people will be aware of, say shark fin soup, but they may not be aware of how expensive some sea cucumber species are.

For example, the Apostichopus Japonicus – this little spiky Japanese sea cucumber. Those things sell for around $3,500 USD a kilogram. So, that's big money. And so, if you're serving that at a banquet, you're able to show off your wealth. And again, it also has these connections with Traditional Chinese Medicine whereby it's been described as the “ginseng of the sea.” But it's also worth noting that there's a whole bunch of other uses. I actually have a book chapter out on non-conventional traditional food uses for sea cucumbers and, so other than, say the food, it's usually traditionally eaten as either its dehydrated and then rehydrated, frozen or canned. There's soup, there's capsules and there's even like holothurian wine. But there's also, you know, sea cucumbers that are consumed in less conventional ways. So in the Cook Islands, people will eat just the intestines of the Black Long sea cucumber. And those actually regrow – so you catch a sea cucumber, take out its intestines, and then pop it back in, and eventually – it's kind of rude, but eventually they regrow.

My friend Igor, actually, who's the editor of the premier journal of sea cucumber studies, made cheese out of sea cucumbers. He has a book chapter out on that I just chatted [unintelligible] about this – but also sea cucumber collagen will be used in cosmetics, in skin whitening creams in some places – which is a kind of different interesting practice altogether. Supplements, there's sea cucumbers have been used in combating some infectious diseases. They've inspired some biotechnology elements, including some of the biomimicry effects of the sea cucumber skin has been used in robots and in different polymers. Sea cucumbers can change the hardness of – stiffness of their dermis so they can go from like, sort of soft, gooey sea cucumber to a harder sea cucumber. And as a result, that has sort of inspired a lot of design effects. And there's a whole bunch of other aspects if people want to take a deep dive into it. But the primary consumption for sea cucumbers is as a luxury seafood item and in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Sydney Lobe: Wow. Who knew all of that from the humble sea cucumber?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Exactly. Yeah, and it's interesting to sort of look into the culture. You and I were just chatting before we started properly recording about some of my other work on sea cucumbers. I guess it was last year, the World of Sea Cucumbers book came out and one of my chapters explored sea cucumbers in popular culture. And so in addition to feeding people and being used in a wide range of things, they've also been part of culture, not as prominent as some more charismatic species, but they certainly make an appearance. People who watch the manga Chainsaw Man, there's a character there that's a sea cucumber demon. There's even a Pokemon Pyukumuku, which is inspired by sea cucumbers.

Sydney Lobe: Wow. We must really be on the same page because that is just a perfect segue to my next question. One of our reporters, Kira, interviewed you for a story in November about how sea cucumber crime and illegal fishing can impact global ecosystems. And something that really stuck with me from that article was that you said it's easy to get people to care about baby seals. They're cute, they're lovable. It's harder to get people to care about sea cucumbers. And I was curious, for work like you're doing, finding ways to make people care is, of course, paramount. So how are you working around that issue with an animal that's more difficult to humanize?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: That is a fantastic question. I also think that if people spend a bit of time studying sea cucumbers, they will appreciate them. But you're right – I've always said if you can't sell the big black, watery eyes of a baby seal, then you shouldn't be in the conservation business. Trying to protect the wolf fish, or krill, or you know, shellfish, it's more challenging. I mean, obviously talking to people about sea cucumbers like we're doing now, how amazing they are, some of the different very cool features and things that they do is important. But also one of the things that we've done and I think is the most effective approach, is really underscoring the parallel between wildlife crime and illegal fishing and organized crime. So as I mentioned, one of my first blogs, and that turned into a large article which I eventually presented to the UN was on the connection between illegal fishing and organized crime.

And there's kind of two broader connections. One is that you see existing organized crime syndicates getting involved in wildlife crime as a way of diversifying their portfolios. So, for example, the Japanese Yakuza allegedly made more money poaching and smuggling sea cucumbers in 2018 than they did with methamphetamines. And so, you see a lot of these organized crime syndicates trying to diversify. I was watching Tulsa King last night, and I just noticed, like, how many business operations these criminals are involved in, and that's one way. And you can also use wildlife products to transport large volumes of money or large values of money across the – please don't, by the way, people who are listening to this, seriously – but a lot of these products are very valuable. So if someone's got a suitcase full of caterpillar fungus or fish maw, they can now transport large amounts of money across borders and avoid detection.

But the second part is that illegal fishing is organized crime in and of itself. If you look at international definitions, and the way that it's framed in different legal structures, you effectively have more than three people engaged in a protracted practice using different forms of command and control, potentially violence, to engage in a criminal activity. I think far too often we have the perception that organized crime is criminals doing business and white collar crime is business people doing crime, but they're one and the same. And so one of the approaches that we've taken to effectively campaigning around species that are less attractive and traditionally charismatic, like sea cucumbers, has been to draw that connection with organized crime. I think it's been quite effective, because a lot of times it's really hard to motivate governments and the public to really care about fish in general, and like less attractive fish, specifically. But they do care about organized crime.

And it's also worth noting that these organized crime syndicates and the people who are fishing illegally and smuggling things like sea cucumbers around the world, are using those same pathways to smuggle other products, whether it's drugs, people, guns or other illicit goods. And so you can infiltrate these networks and wind them up by targeting the weaker links of the network. So, as I said earlier, people transporting guns are going to have high security, but people transporting sea cucumbers may be a little more relaxed, and so you can wind up networks in a more effective way.

Sydney Lobe: Interesting, thank you. Thinking about sea cucumbers being one of the less charismatic fish for example, like you just mentioned, I'm also curious – we were talking a little bit earlier about sea cucumbers in popular culture – I'm curious about representation as well, and how besides just kind of our general view of what a sea cucumber is based on what we've seen in a photo, for example, or on the beach a few years ago. How does the sea cucumber’s representation in media or popular culture affect the way we think about them?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Oh, that is a fantastic question. I think generally there is an absence of representation in popular culture. So generally the lack of sea cucumbers in popular culture reflects a general lack of knowledge or appreciation for the species. But, because I took a deep dive into this and have written a book chapter on it, I can say that when you do dig into it, you can actually see a lot of sea cucumbers in popular culture, but they're often sort of hidden. So when you're looking at books, you'll see them as background or establishing shots. I read every children's book that mentioned sea cucumbers, and I think only one of them has the sea cucumber as a main character. They're often portrayed as the monstrous. The subheading for my book chapter is the “Sea cucumber in popular culture: Mystery, muse and monster.” And we talk about how sea cucumbers are often presented as a mysterious thing that's less well known. They're also presented as background context. And then when they are represented as characters, they're often represented as monsters, so monstrous. And then obviously the erotic and titillating as well. Sea cucumbers, as I've mentioned earlier, they're somewhat phallic or some might say quite phallic. And that's like the vast majority of representation in a lot of popular culture, particularly anime and manga, has strong phallic associations.

The best example is the tropic beach episode in manga and anime, where all the characters just go to the beach for the afternoon as a one off episode, and if there's a sea cucumber at that beach episode, it's going to be shot, thrown, or squirted in someone's face. One of the most academic sentences I've had to write to describe this was, “the character sensuously manipulates the sea cucumber until such time as it ejects its cuvierian tubules into the face of her bikini clad colleague.” Which was a very academic way of saying a person basically squeezed a sea cucumber until it squirted in someone's face. *laughter*

So that was – yeah, sometimes we have to keep our academic writing –

Sydney Lobe: Get creative.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yeah, yeah. What's interesting there is actually that's one of the two main defense mechanisms that sea cucumbers have. These aren't speedy fish. These aren't the bluefin tuna of the sea. The two main defense mechanisms that sea cucumbers use is either evisceration or cuvierian tubules. So evisceration is when you eject your inner organs and you vomit up your mouth, or your breathing apparatus, your feeding apparatus, and you sacrifice that in the hopes of regrowing it and living another day. And cuvierian tubules – and this is why there's some sort of phallic representations as well – are these long, white, stringy tubes that sea cucumbers will eject and they will get stuck, entangled in the gills of fish that are trying to eat them. And so one can see the clear parallels between sea cucumbers and sort of the more erogenous, as it were.

I did have something funny – like, I think I was telling my favorite story around that was writing to the British Museum to get permission to reproduce a 1850s shunga print from Japan in our book chapter. And they asked for cash money, and we're like, you know what? I'm not going to spend 250 pounds to reproduce erotic art that’s a couple hundred years old. I can find something else.

Sydney Lobe: Yeah, not like the British Museum needs that money either, but that’s besides the point.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: *laughter* Right? Yeah, they probably stole it. That’s right.

Sydney Lobe: Yes, you were owed that illustration.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: That's right. We did find some other really good ones. The best ones I think were one of the Japanese Marine Defense Force bases has a mascot that is a giant pink sea cucumber. And it's absolutely hilarious because you'll have these very serious military professionals and military vessels and gear, and then this bright pink sea cucumber in a sailor suit running around in photos, which is pretty good. And then the other one would have been – I got to make the day of an amazing fanfiction writer who wrote fanfiction about sea cucumbers, and I got to reproduce their erotic watercolor in our book chapter. And it was pretty cool.

Sydney Lobe: Yeah, that's excellent. So on that, would you say that besides sort of like a passive attitude or indifference toward sea cucumbers, that these erotic representations in popular culture sort of breed disgust as a common attitude towards sea cucumbers or is that not necessarily something you found?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: That's a really good question. I don't know if necessarily it's – yeah, disgust is definitely there, but I think it's the objectification, as well. So you're not treating the sea cucumber as a character with agency that can participate in the adventure. The sea cucumber is either background or an object, in this case, a sensual object. So I think that, yeah, you're right in the sense there's disgust because it's a slimy tubule thing that's being thrown in someone's face. Oh, it's always the face, by the way. But also, I think it's the othering. You don’t really see characters that are happy little sea cucumbers. Really the only one I can think of, apart from obviously Pyukumuku, which is a lesser well known Pokemon. The only other really examples – like there was a book called Pandemic Cuties, which was a children's book written to encourage kids to wear masks. And one of the characters, a side character, was a sea cucumber, and it had eyes and it swam around. But typically you'll see sea cucumbers not as like main characters that have personality and plot for sure.

And I'm not saying we've seen a lot of conservation issues. It's just the objectification of things and treating them as objects and sources of money rather than important animals, and that can even come to the way we talk about them. Like, we talk about populations and, you know, the fishing stocks treat them as an entity that's not really defined as individuals versus individual animals. I find that comes up a lot when we're doing writing around this subject as well.

Sydney Lobe: That's very interesting. Yeah, I kind of wanted to pivot a little bit, if that's okay, and talk a bit about the criminal issue of illegal fishing. Because you've said that marine wildlife crime or illegal fishing are often treated more as administrative issues, and I'm curious if that has mostly to do with jurisdictional overlap that comes with managing marine ecosystems or what that's due to?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: That's a good question. There's a lot of reasons, I think it's just interesting how when you look at things like illegal fishing itself, right? Let's just take a step back – and I should say that the term I like to use is fisheries crime. Because what I found, the more I look into it, is we think of illegal fishing as the act of removing fishing illegally and that's one aspect of it. But there's so much crime associated at every single stage of the fisheries supply chain that we use the term fisheries crime. And basically that refers to crime, where people will be forging documents and bribing officials to get permission to fish. The act of fishing illegally will be using illegal gear, fishing in restricted areas, fishing outside of season, using human rights violations on cruise.

But then once the sea cucumber is caught, you have fish laundering where a illegally caught fish is then introduced into markets in a way that makes it look legal. You've got smuggling, you've got bribery and coercion and extortion. In one of my papers in Mexico, we found numerous cases of people being killed for sea cucumbers, like gunfights and robbery. And then you have even people mislabeling sea cucumbers. So, describing fake countries of origin. Apparently, when people are selling sea cucumbers in the streets in Sheung Wan, for example, there's a tendency to give them geographic origins that are associated with clean, pristine waters rather than ones that have less positive associations.

So effectively you have at every stage of the supply chain. But typically the act of illegal fishing, the removing of the fish from the ocean is often treated as an administrative issue. And as a result, the punishment is like a fine. And that fine is often a percentage of the actual – like a small percentage of the actual income the fishers make, so it becomes part of the cost of doing business. If someone was mowing down elephants or gazelles or any terrestrial species, we would see that as a crime and try to stop them. But someone does the same thing on the high seas it's often seen as like, “Oh well, they just fish over their limit,” or something along those lines. And I think part of this comes back to that conversation around our association with specific animals.

So, we can connect and anthropomorphize animals that have eyes and hands that look like calves. You know, raccoons, great. They look like us. They've got little cute eyes and they've got little hands. We can connect with them in a way that we can't with a worm or a krill or a sea cucumber, and that's part of it. And then I think also, it's just the way that we've treated the oceans. I've always shown whenever I do a lecture – when I'm doing a lecture on this, I often show a picture of a healthy ocean and an unhealthy ocean, and it's just the same picture because you can't often see what's beneath the surface. Whereas if I was to show you a picture of a healthy forest and a clear cut forest, there's a pretty clear cut, you know, way that you could differentiate between the two of them, right? So effectively the – I think we've just as a society often treated the ocean as a dumping ground and, kind of othered the denizens of the ocean. And as a result, we treat crime there as an administrative issue. But really, if someone was going to our forests and poaching bears and taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bears, or millions of dollars worth of bears, we would probably treat that more seriously than we would with the more administrative aspects of fishing.

And the other aspects, like you're asking about jurisdictional overlap. Most fishing takes place close to shore within the jurisdictions of countries, but not all. And so, you know, high seas fishing is a challenge because it's often very poorly administered. And then also fishing in areas that might fall outside of the jurisdiction of a Regional Fisheries Management Organization, or RFMO. We can start with the acronym soup already. And so effectively you'll often see the challenge of on the high seas, it's stopping people fishing illegally there. There's less fishing on the high seas than closer to shore, and in those situations, it's often resources. Like, if you think of Canada, we have a massive archipelago, we have three coasts, we've got huge swaths of ocean and our law enforcement has relatively high capacity. The case that we're talking about, the recent sea cucumber case here had DFO chasing down illegal fishers. But in some places you have, like Indonesia for example, you have tens of thousands of islands and you're simply administering and monitoring, effectively enforcing becomes a problem.

But there's also – so there's both a capacity issue, but there's also a political will issue. And that's largely because fisheries are a constituency of politicians and people who fish vote, fish don't vote. And as a result, you'll see governments favoring fishers with changes in quotas when those changes are not good for ecosystems, they're good for electoral results. Like one of the craziest examples – and this is a term I don't think anyone listening to this would ever imagine they would hear, but if folks are familiar with Lonesome George, the giant tortoise from the Galapagos? Lonesome George was an iconic symbol of conservation for many years. He passed away, fortunately from old age, relatively recently. But this is a several hundred year old giant tortoise, and twice it was kidnaped – or tortoise-napped – by sea cucumber fishers trying to leverage the government for higher quotas. So they kidnaped and threatened to kill a giant tortoise in order to increase their quotas.

Sydney Lobe: Oh my God.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yeah. And actually park rangers have also been killed in this conflict. And effectively, there's big money at stake. And so often governments will cave and pander to constituencies that give them votes right away as opposed to strong and sound marine conservation principles. So there's a lot of features at play. But I think a lot of times, yeah, we ignore the ocean and it's often easier to give out quotas of fishers and to tell them, “Maybe we need to let the fishery sustain itself.”

I should make a quick note on conservation here, just briefly. I jumped into – didn't you know, fully espouse the benefits of sea cucumbers. The individual species, there's only a few of them that are actually on species watch lists, for concern around conservation status. The big issue with sea cucumbers is that they're not particularly fast moving, they don't travel long distances. And as a result – and they also rely on broadcast breeding. So they’re required to have a certain density of individual animals in order to successfully reproduce. If that density drops below a certain point, then they just can't reproduce and recover. So if you have an area that is overfished or fished out, that population may never recover. And what folks have actually been doing in Mexico is fishers will gather sea cucumbers from a coast and concentrate them in a small area so they can successfully breed and try to recover the population. But it's pretty tough – in the Galapagos, some of the populations took years to recover and the government was trying to manage them, but of course the fishers wanted quick money.

And what we've actually seen with these fisheries is they very much follow the boom and bust cycle, like a couple of years. The middleman, these what we call roving bandits, will show up and start buying sea cucumbers at relatively high rates for local economies. Fishers switch all their money to sea cucumbers, they fish extensively. The population is fished out, it never recovers. The roving bandits move on, and the local economy and society is crushed. And this is a common pattern that takes place in these fisheries. And the challenge, of course, is that those populations require a lot of work to recover often, years and years. And also sometimes they just don't recover.

Sydney Lobe: Thank you for saying that. Actually, you're really on my wavelength today because my next question was going to be, what happens if sea cucumbers are overfished? And so I appreciate you getting into that ahead of –

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: I can talk a bit more about it insofar as the way the fishery typically works is it starts with gleaning. So people, often women and children collecting sea cucumbers on the shore, so like the high seas and the high tide and splash zone. And then as those populations are reduced, divers – people will collect them low tide. And then divers will be used, using typically a hooka snorkel method. And that's typically men, and so you see a really strong gender division in labor where women will be involved in gleaning and processing, and then men will be doing diving. And the diving actually can be quite dangerous because people will stay down far too long and get the Bends. And there's hundreds of cases of this in, say, for example, the Mexican sea cucumber fishery, where people will be fishing remotely for sea cucumbers and get the Bends and have long term health consequences as a result.

Sydney Lobe: And how about the effect for the ecosystem to which the sea cucumbers belong? I know you mentioned they're kind of cornerstones of those ecosystems, or every grain of sand moves through them. So, if a sea cucumber population is overfished, then what does that mean for their friends down there?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Well, exactly. So like sea cucumbers are deposit feeders and suspension feeders. So the two species out here on the West Coast that I mentioned earlier, the Red or Giant sea cucumber, those are deposit feeders. So they burrow through the sediment, consuming detritus. And then the Orange sea cucumbers, they have these beautiful fans they put out and they'll use those for feeding. People may have seen some TikTok videos of just gorgeous sea cucumber mouths drawing in particles to their central mouth, and as a result, these species are heavily involved in the nutrient cycling in the ocean. So they are removing organic content and their guts are dissolving some of the calcium carbonate, some shells and coral sand and rubble, and it's actually increased the alkalinity of seawater. So they're able to change the acidity of the water around them, which obviously helps species. And there's been some really fascinating research on that. Don't have exact numbers off the top of my head, but you'll actually see less acidity in the waters around sea cucumbers. And this improves coral growth, and they excrete inorganic nitrogen, phosphorus and pneumonia. They also in their burrowing creates a bioturbation which reduces organic loads and it redistributes surface sediment. There's been some pretty wild research. Like, as I said, you know, every grain of sand has passed through a cucumber at some point. And one really interesting study out of Heron Island Reef in Queensland, Australia in 2021. It's a 19 square kilometer reef and the main species of sea cucumber out there is the Black sea cucumber, the Lolly fish, the Holothuria Atra – actually, I think some of them have multiple common names. And each individual Lolly fish will defecate around 38 grams a day, or 14 kilograms a year. And with a population of 3 million, that's 64,000 metric tons of sea cucumber feces, or five times the weight of the Eiffel Tower for one reef of sea cucumbers.

So they're very important for those ecosystems. And, they're everywhere. Like, the deep sea ocean is full of Seegurke, sea pigs. And actually, just back to our popular culture references, that's the other area where you see sea cucumbers, which is in death metal, because the sea cucumber vomiting up its guts is kind of a – it's got a lot of representation in relation to sort of punk culture. So there's a lot of German punk around Seegurke, and I have a whole Spotify playlist of every song in the world that mentioned sea cucumbers, and a lot of them are psychedelic adventures, and then a bunch of them are German death metal.

Sydney Lobe: Wow, that's fascinating. I guess it is pretty punk to vomit up your intestines.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Exactly. Seegurke! One of my favorite stories around that was – I reached out to an artist in the UK who their song mentioned sea cucumbers, or bêche-de-mer, which is the dried form of sea cucumber in the Pacific. And I reached out to them and said, “I'm writing a paper on sea cucumbers and popular culture.” And their first response was, “Why are you reaching out to us? We're not popular. We're like a nothing band from Chester.” But they were using the sea cucumbers in the context of the vomitous nature of sea cucumbers.

Sydney Lobe: Interesting. Yeah. So let's get down to it – I want to talk about Scott Steer. From what I understand, this is the largest sea cucumber crime case in Canadian history and it's just wrapping up in the Nanaimo. It involved a repeat offender, a boat chase, all the makings of like you said, a true crime drama. And I'm curious, if you can just talk a little bit about to start, what your involvement was with this case?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: So I will say this, my involvement was mostly as an outside observer. I've been studying sea cucumber crime around the world, and a lot of my work has looked at India and Sri Lanka, as well as Mexico. What I was doing during the pandemic was trying to identify hotspots, where there was a lot more crime. And then the idea was we could put out reports on those areas and then work with governments to increase enforcement. And there's been some success.

So, you know, I was working with law enforcement in the southern part of India, and they've just created – just actually prior to our involvement, they created the world's first sea cucumber preserve protected area, which was great. And the government in Sri Lanka, the Navy's been doing a phenomenal job, as is India, really cracking down on illegal fishing. It's still extensive, and as I mentioned earlier, the roving bandit syndrome is a huge problem because people will move around. So we've actually tracked sea cucumber crime from the Gulf of Mannar all the way over to Lakshadweep. So they're kind of moving around. And what was happening was I was talking to a lot of journalists and folks about sea cucumber crime outside of Canada, and the question would always come up like, “Hey, what's going on here?” And, our answer was, “We don't know. We're not currently looking at it.”

So a couple years ago, myself and some colleagues, we got together and worked on a paper on sea cucumber crime in Canada. And that paper looks at media studies, court cases and law enforcement records from 2015 to 2022. And just as we were, looking at that, the Scott Steer case happened. So I've been kind of following it from when it's initially happened all the way through the course of its history. And now, of course, he's been charged with eight counts, but yeah. So, more as an observer in this case, mostly because there's not as much sea cucumber crime in Canada as one would think. Which is actually really exciting – so my paper's currently under review. Hopefully it'll be coming out this spring in the Beche-de-mere Information Bulletin, the premier journal on sea cucumber studies – the only one. And, what we found looking at police records and court cases and news stories was we only found 24 cases of sea cucumber related crime in that time period. And the vast majority of them were administrative – and in this case, they really were administrative. Like, it was people who forgot their licenses and that's like a $35 fine. And every so often people went over their bag limits, and things like that.

There were seven criminal cases, and those amounted to around $21,000, but no fines. And it's hard to say if this is the biggest sea cucumber crime in history insofar as I haven't looked before 2015. But the previous case that was the largest was, R v Zhao from 2019, where an individual was fishing in a restricted area. They were overfishing, and there were some other offenses as well, and they were ultimately fined around $30,000. And so that was sort of the biggest other case. There’s been a couple other cases out here. There's a recreational fishery in British Columbia where individuals can take about 12 animals. You can take 12 animals, 24 is the maximum that folks are allowed to take. And, there's been a couple of incidents where people had well more than that. Like 800 sea cucumbers in a bag, it was clearly not like a recreational thing.

So, there's kind of that, but the vast majority of the cases were just people not having licenses. And what was interesting about this case is it's the opposite. Like, this is a huge case. Yes, so we can jump into it, but I wasn't sure what the best step was to jump in for next steps.

Sydney Lobe: Sure, yeah. I mean, I'm just curious – you had mentioned, since he started, I know the most recent offense before this one was 2021, is that right? But I'm not sure when his first offense was.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yeah, I think – this is off the top of my head. I think it goes back to 2018, and was not sea cucumber related. The original cases were for poaching Dungeness crab and halibut and prawns and other fish. And as a result, Scott Steer was banned from ever setting foot on a fishing boat until 2038. And that's sort of the background to what would happen – it's worth jumping into what happened because it's pretty high seas adventure kind of stuff.

But effectively, this is back in March 2020. You have a boat that's dark fishing off the coast. Someone sees it from a ferry and is like, “That's a dark boat, that seems sus.” They reported to the DFO, DFO sends out a boat. The boat gives chase. The captain of the boat throws his cellphone over the side of the boat and they eventually catch him. Divers go down three days later to retrieve the cell phone. They rip the data off of it and they find out this person's extensive criminal operation. And it's effectively a fishing company that Scott Steer set up with his partner, Melissa Steer. And they've been effectively – they bought a fishing boat, which he's not allowed to do. He's on a fishing boat, which he's not allowed to do. And they were moving almost $1 million CAN in sea cucumbers, around 10,000 pounds of sea cucumbers. So it's quite a significant operation. Again, organized crime. And this resulted in a 29 day trial in Nanaimo that just wrapped up this month, in January 2025. And ultimately, Scott was charged with eight counts of fisheries violations, and I believe sentencing is taking place relatively soon.

Sydney Lobe: And his partner, Melissa, was the sole owner of this numbered company, is that right? That was moving around the funds?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: I don’t know the exact details of the company ownership. That's a really good question. I know a lot of times people involved in fisheries crime will have letter box companies in multiple companies – I don't know the details of exactly all the company ownership, but she was definitely involved in that I believe she was a director of the company. I don't know if she was the sole director? Not sure what the structures were like.

Sydney Lobe: But they were being fished and then – or harvested and then sold. Is that correct?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yes. That's right. Exactly. And the challenge you get with fish, and this is there's a lot of illicit products, is they're easy to launder because effectively one fish is a fish that was fished illegally and a fish that was fished legally, they look the same. They're the same fish effectively. And so what we saw, for example, in India and Sri Lanka, is in India it's illegal to fish for sea cucumbers and in Sri Lanka it's not, there's a legal market. And so people will fish sea cucumbers illegally in India, smuggle them into Sri Lanka and then launder them through that country and then ultimately take them to often Hong Kong and Southeast Asia and southern parts of China, where they will enter the markets. And you can't tell the difference between the two of them.

So when we say that, you know, Steer pulled in tens of thousands of pounds of sea cucumbers, those can then be introduced into legal markets. Because there is a legal market here in British Columbia, I should note we have a legal fishery. The fishery, I think it's been around since around 1970s, there were sort of the beginnings of a commercial sea cucumber operation in British Columbia, that total allowable catch is around 614 tonnes. There's about 30 vessels involved. It's open for eight weeks starting in October, and in 2022 it pulled in around $15 million CAN, a little bit over that. And these are fisheries for typically Giant Red sea cucumber or the Apostichopus californicus. And that's the large red one I was talking about earlier. And they’re around 60 centimeters, around a kilogram. And they’re largest of the 45 species found in British Columbia, in fact, which I've only ever seen two species of sea cucumber out here, so I really need to see some of the other ones. They’re probably deeper sea, but yeah.

So it's actually – it's worth noting what Steers is doing is not only is he damaging ecosystems, but he's also stealing from legal fishers and the government; not, you know, paying proper taxes and ultimately degrading ecosystems and requiring extensive law enforcement. So there's a lot of harms that are resulting from his actions.

Sydney Lobe: Yeah. Multi-dimensional it seems.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: And it's interesting too, like this is someone who, you know, this is – by the way, this took place near Powell River, and McLean's described Steer as the most prolific poacher in the West Coast. Canadian fisheries are relatively well managed, and if you look at this guy's history, yes, you're saying he was involved in poaching crab and halibut and prawns. It's extensive. And so yeah, this case – the next question is sentencing. So what sentence he receives of – preventing from stepping on fishing boats hasn't worked in the past, and neither have fines and other punishments. So one of the challenges we often get in marine conservation is the punishments do not fit the crime and become part of the cost of doing business. Someone who's got a $5,000 fine, but they pulled in $1 million in sea cucumbers doesn't exactly serve as a deterrent and nor does it effectively allow the state to recover funds to repair the damage that that person's done. My hope is that the person actually gets the books thrown at them so that we actually don't see future damage.

One of the things that we find when we're doing advocacy around this issue is educating law enforcement and the legal system, because often what happens is that law enforcement also consider these kinds of crimes to be administrative crimes. And we've had cases in the Galapagos where justices saw the original first few wildlife crimes and they were like, “Oh, it's a fine, this person's just fishing over.” And that person keeps fishing over and keeps fishing over and keeps degrading the ecosystem. And there's a lot of groups that we're working to educate the legal system to be like, “No, no, actually this is incredibly harmful.”

Like, if someone had gone into a government warehouse and stolen $10,000 worth of merchandise, you would put them in jail for years. If someone does that in our ocean, we give them a small fine? Like, that seems problematic. And so a lot of times it's just educating law enforcement, and reasonably so, right? As we have throughout our conversation, we've talked about sea cucumbers as a species that people don't know very much about. And so often someone's got a bag full of sea cucumbers, who knows what they're worth, right? And a lot of folks who are doing border security or law enforcement may not be familiar with them as a species. And so as a result, they get overlooked.

Sydney Lobe: Yeah. So, I'm curious – were the punishment to fit the crime in this case, what meaning, if any, would that have for your work?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: It's a good question. And in this case, I don't even know what the effective punishment would be just because of the eight counts. I don't know how the courts will weigh the person's past crimes and the impact of their crimes. But it's important insofar as you want – this is kind of getting into like the theory of law, right? You want punishment to serve as a deterrent. You want it to effectively ensure that the person doesn't do it again, both the individual and other members of society. But you also want to try to repair the damage, and this is getting into some challenges you have with conservation work. There's a great legal theorist called Christopher Stone, and he wrote an article called “Should Trees Have Standing.” This is going back a bit of time, but if people are listening and they're interested, I highly recommend reading it, it's not that long and it's very accessible. But he's effectively arguing that one of the challenges you have in conservation work is the compensation that one receives from, say, fines from criminals or companies that pollute, goes to other humans, but doesn't often go to protecting the environment.

And the best example here is the Deepwater Horizon disaster, where you have millions of dollars paid out to tour operators and fishers who are operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and none of that money is actually going to the ecosystem itself. And what Christopher Stone argues is that natural features, species, ecosystems, they can be damaged, they can benefit from compensation, and they can be represented in court. And as a result, maybe we should let them be represented in court. Such as the fines that are levied, go partially to supporting and undoing the harm that the person did to ecosystems.

So yeah, it doesn't happen all the time, not as often as we'd like. Some systems in some cases are better than others. But yeah, ultimately it would be nice to see some of the harm being undone. What exactly it looks like in this case, I think, remains to be seen.

Sydney Lobe: Well, thank you for this fascinating interview. Before we wrap up, if it's okay with you, I have one final question.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Please.

Sydney Lobe: So you mentioned in the previous interview that the Martlet conducted with you for the article I mentioned, that people can affect change on a personal level with respect to marine conservation and even sea cucumbers specifically, even though, like you mentioned, this is a huge administrative, legal, global issue. You mentioned the example of protecting a specific bay, and that seemed to me like something that was approachable and intriguing. And I'm curious if you can tell me a little bit more about how somebody would go about doing something like that?

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Oh, great question. I think this is really important to talk about now, particularly more than ever. I'm not sure about you, but I've been watching what's happening in America where you see rolling back of fundamental rights. You see the unwinding of important legislation from both a conservation and reproductive justice perspective, and also just a whole bunch of other horrifying stuff. And I think that it's overwhelming to see that, right? You know, a lot of people are distracted by Elon Musk seen hieling his way across the stage when it's all of the presidential decrees that are being written that are actually going to have a devastating effect on people, our environment and our globe.

And we often look at that and we can feel helpless and hopeless, and the kind of grief and depression that results of looking at these horrifying events is not a motivating emotion. And then the risk becomes that we become complacent, or we sort of just close off because the issues are too big for us.

Sydney Lobe: Yeah, we're resigned to it.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yeah. And like climate change: huge issue, super scary. And honestly, one individual is going to have to work very, very hard to really solve that problem. And it's not only a problem that you solve, and especially not a problem you solve on your own, it's just an ongoing process. And so I think the approach I've always taken is breaking these issues down into small, bite sized chunks. And the size of the chunk depends on the person. So in some cases that might just be someone telling their friends about sea cucumbers. And other situations it might be changing your diet or maybe avoiding certain kinds of foods if you think those are gonna have an impact. But those are like, that's the personal politics stuff.

But at the same time, individuals can have a broader effect and also should if they can and have the capacity. And that would involve stepping up with some friends to form a campaign or to advocate for something. I've got some Snyder’s On Tyranny sitting here on my table, my friend just got me a copy. And it talks about in these times of tyranny and potential oppression, choosing one institution to monitor and to effectively make sure that you're keeping an eye on that one institution, you and a small group of friends, and it makes it more manageable.

So when it comes to species like sea cucumbers, it might just be getting involved in some of our amazing local West Coast conservation organizations, like Surfrider doing beach cleanups. But I often find that those kind of become Sisyphean after a while. Like, you know, you clean the beach, plastic washes up again. So maybe it's advocating to your local government to reduce plastic waste or the provincial government or the federal government to do that. Or doing some kind of advocacy that is manageable within your means, that helps make the world a better place that you can focus on, rather than kind of getting lost in the constant shuffle and the noise that's out there.

We were very successful with this on our contraception campaign, where all we did was fight for free prescription contraception, and there's a lot more work that needs to be done on reproductive justice in general. But because we were able to focus on that one issue, we were therefore able to just stay dedicated to it and ultimately succeed. When it comes to sea cucumbers, and it's a really fascinating area because there's been such little work done on it and less attention for law enforcement, that when you sit down with law enforcement and do an education workshop on what are sea cucumbers and why you should take it seriously – people listen and they're now on the lookout for sea cucumber poachers.

I think it's really, it's so critical that people – we don't lose hope, and that we try to do our part, whenever that is within our capacity. And I often find that it's taking these manageable sized campaigns on issues that you're passionate about and working on those, rather than trying to focus on these giant windmills that are so far away and so large and scary that we ultimately can’t effectively effect change.

Sydney Lobe: Yeah. Well, what a perfect note to end on, a hopeful one. I appreciate that. It's encouraging, and it's I think what a lot of us need to hear. So, thank you.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for letting me talk about sea cucumbers. Thank you. It's one of the fun parts of my job. There's always kind of a twinkle in our eye when we talk about sea cucumber crime because the first thing you think of – and actually the first thing AI thinks of is little sea cucumbers with fedoras in back alleys trying to shake people down. I had some fun with the AI image generators and sea cucumbers when they weren't blocking it, because crime is apparently on their terms of reference. But I think it's important that people realize the full scope of work that's out there.

And for students who are listening and interested in doing research advocacy, which is what I do with my work, often I find really understanding an issue and diving into it creates new opportunities, and it's often hard to understand a big issue. A friend of mine was studying cancer research. She was like, “There's hundreds of articles that come on every day. It's physically impossible to keep up on every research article that comes out on cancer research.” So you have to pick a smaller niche that it's bite sized, and you can really get to know that one particular area. And I've done that with with my work in illegal fishing, there's a lot of illegal fishing out there. But because we've been able to focus on a couple of key species, we can really get to understand them and therefore really affect change in that one small area. So yeah, it's kind of finding those areas where you can take what you love doing, in this case for me, it's research advocacy, and try to use that to make the world a better place and try to save the world by doing what you love and through your passion and dedication.

So yeah, people who are interested in learning more about my work in general, my website teale.ca has pretty much everything there. There's a link to all my various projects, whether it's sea cucumbers, reproductive justice, road safety, local Saanich issues, separation of religion, government, and more. And there's also links to my academic publications there. If people are really interested in taking a deep dive into sea cucumber crime or sea cucumbers in popular culture, or this amazing species in general, please go to the library and check out the World of Sea Cucumbers. It is the comprehensive book of all things sea cucumber, I'm a coauthor on three chapters in it. It's 51 chapters of an amazing edited volume of sea cucumber information. I can't imagine our amazing editors putting together such a large project – it's like 800 pages of sea cucumber goodness. And if folks are interested in learning about our work with Oceans Asia, we're at oceansasia.org. And I think we're @oceansasia1 on a decent range of social medias. A lot of our work has shifted lately to academic desktop research, just given the vicissitudes of funding. So we aren't currently out in the field at the moment, but we might be in the future. And yeah, if people are interested if they're local I'm always happy to get together and talk to folks about research advocacy and my work in marine conservation or some of my other work that we've kind of mentioned. @tealepb on most social medias, although I'm trying to move away from some of them. I think the most I'm active on is Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Sydney Lobe: Well thank you. Thank you so much. It's been such a joy to talk to you and I really appreciate you taking the time and spending part of your afternoon with us.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Thanks so much for chatting with me.

Sydney Lobe: That was Teale Phelps Bondaroff, world leading expert on sea cucumber crime. Today we spoke about marine conservation, how media representation affects popular perceptions of animals like sea cucumbers, and in turn, the efforts to protect them. And Scott Steer, a recently convicted sea cucumber criminal from Nanaimo.

Our January print issue came out on January 23, and our February online issue will be out on February 6. So feel free to head to our website or visit a pub box to read the

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Rae Dawson: Thanks for tuning into The Nest, a podcast by UVic’s independent newspaper, the Martlet. You can read the latest edition of the Martlet’s publication on martlet.ca or find us on X, TikTok and LinkedIn as @theMartlet. Interested in getting involved? Email edit@martlet.ca to learn more about volunteer writer, editor and design positions.

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