Off the coast of Italy, a radical approach to battling illegal fishing: a seafloor sculpture museum

Young, along with Italian artists Giorgio Butini and Massimo Lippi, and other artists from four countries, was asked to carve the marble blocks. “We all donated our time. I thought it was a brilliant project: it would attract more attention to the problem,” says Young, whose studio is the former monastery of Santa Croce between Pisa and Rome.

Casa dei Pesci raised funds through crowdfunding and donations, and Fanciulli and Turco used their local contacts to help transporting and lowering the sculptures on sea bed. Even with “friendly” fees, it costs €5000 to transport and lower just one block into the sea.

The sculptures were placed in a circle, four metres apart around a central obelisk, carved by Massimo Catalani, another Italian artist. A bit further sleeps a mermaid, a collaboration by sculptor Lea Monetti and young artist Aurora Vantaggiato, and a reclining figure by Butini, among other works.

Guarding carbon capture

The marble sculptures create both a physical barrier for the trawlers’ nets and a unique underwater museum, open to anyone either through arranged scuba diving tours or their own dive. “It’s really beautiful and it’s amazing to see how easy it is for nature to recover. We want people to see under the surface of the sea and create a new consciousness for sustainable sea development,” explains Turco.

(Related: in search of the Mediterranean's great white sharks.)

The scheme has completely stopped illegal trawling within three miles off shore in front of Talamone as far south as the mouth of the Ombrone river, Turco says. “But now the pirate boats have moved north of the Ombrone. Casa dei Pesci plans to protect this stretch of sea as well, up to the limit of the municipality of Grosseto. Further north, it will be up to other fishermen and other municipalities to decide what to do. If all the traditional small-scale fishermen and all the municipalities decided to do the same, then there would be no more space for illegal fishing and the sea would repopulate.”

Despite this victory, the vast expanses of Posidonia meadows, devasted by the bottom trawlers, are not likely to recover, says Fabrizio Serena, Associate Senior Researcher CNR IRBIM National Research Council – Institute of Marine Biological Resources and Biotechnologies in Mazara del Vallo.  While algae generally reproduce fast, the life cycle of Posidonia is much slower. “In order to obtain well-structured Posidonia beds, we need about 30-40 years and a well-protected environment where pollution and human disturbances are absent, and this is practically impossible today.”

When a Posidonia prairie is compromised, the only thing to do is to try to protect what remains of it, Serena adds.  “In this sense the Talamone statues can still protect the few Posidonia beds that have remained and this is an important protective action, the only example in the Mediterranean area.”

The statues are also providing a structure for organisms to attach themselves and grow. After just one or two weeks, the stones are covered with a slight film of unicellular microorganisms (bacteria, microalgae and fungi), Serena says. A year or more later, larger organisms, such as barnacles, oysters, algae, corals, sponges, star fish and crabs have made their homes there as well. (Related: can we save coral reefs?)

This structured community has, in turn, encouraged more plant life and sea creatures to return. Fishermen have already noticed that lobsters, octopuses, breams, damsels and even a pod of bottlenose dolphins, which hadn’t been seen for years, have returned to these waters.

The dolphins, however, are causing problems. “There is a growing conflict between dolphins and fishermen because there isn’t enough food for them at large, so they come closer to the coast and push the fish into the nets and suck up the catch, damaging the nets,” says Enrica Franchi, a researcher at the University of Siena. Her team is working in collaboration with Fanciulli and local fishermen to try to prevent dolphins and sea turtles - which come closer to the coast in the spring and summer to nest – from becoming entangled in the nets.  Last year, they have launched a project to fit the nets with acoustic and ultraviolet devises to keep dolphins and turtles away.

Hopefully, over the years, the Talamone sculptures will be teeming with marine life. “Within five to seven more years, if there's no disturbance, the underwater museum can become an area rich in biodiversity and satisfy, in a way, the needs of the marine ecosystem,” Serena says. And the statues will keep their silent watch for thousands of years.

The statues, says sculptor Young, “are a poetic venture of imagination, an act of faith. The project addresses the future, and whether we're here or not, the stones will be, for possibly millions of years, carrying something of our humanity into the unknowable future, embodied in material millions of years old, carved by a human hand.”