The Philippines has one of the largest biodiversities in the world and is one of the biodiversity hotspots. The marine life in the Philippines makes up a significant portion of the biodiversity and the coasts in the country are brimming with coral reefs. Unfortunately the marine life in the Philippines is under constant threat from a whole bunch of different things.
Due to the high commercial value of a lot of the marine life in the waters around the Philippines the reefs are constantly overfished. In recent years a lot of the fish caught have been juvenile fish that have yet to fully mature. Many of the fish caught don’t even stay in the Philippines and are instead shipped out to other countries such as China where eating fish is a strong part of the culture. Local fisherman have a hard time catching enough fish to make and living and also feed their families. This is only further burdened by the high population growth rate in the Philippines where it is common for a local fisherman to have a family with five or more children.
In desperation to try and catch more fish it is becoming increasingly common for cyanide and dynamite to be used to catch the fish. While these fishing techniques can pay off in the short term, in the long term they are damaging and destroying reefs making the fish population even more scarce. If dynamite is detonated too deep in the water it becomes very likely that most of the fish that are killed by the blast won’t even be catchable.
Unfortunately it’s very hard for things to change in the Philippines because even though laws might be put in place to ban fishing in certain areas a lot of the time they just aren’t strongly enforced enough. Hopefully something might change in the country soon to help turn things around, but as they stand now the marine life in the Philippines will just continue to deplete and many species are in danger of possibly becoming extinct.
blogodiversity 
December 3, 2012 at 6:49 pm
I’ve been fishing in the Philippine water’s and I have to agree on the fact that the fish population there is not what it used to be. I have heard many locales tell of tales of massive fishing areas being completely barren in almost 10 years due to the massive amount of fishing boats that trawl around the waters. I have also seen fishermans themselves in person fishing with dynamite and it is a very scary thing to see.