There are sometimes stories of the Google cars catching criminals in the act or even knocking over donkeys. But what about catching industrial scale overfishing?

• One way of catching fish on a large scale is by weir; a large, non-moving construct to catch fish (see picture above)
• Researchers contacted local, Persian-gulf academics to find out how many fish were caught per wier.
• Using Google images, the academics counted up the number of weirs, multiplied by average yields and estimated under-reporting of fishing catches.
• The worst offenders are estimated to be Bahrain, reporting around a tenth of catches, and Iran. Though, Iran doesn’t actually bother reporting any of it’s fishing to the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
• Inaccuracies in reported fishing can lead to depletion of fish stocks, and bad policy decisions.

For an overview head over to Quartz, which has a link to the very short and readable journal article.

Source: Quartz