Ecuador's Navy Deploys Canadian Dark-Vessel-Detection AI to Guard the Galápagos From Illegal Fishing

The Galápagos Marine Reserve covers roughly 133,000 square kilometres and hosts about 3,000 marine species, around a fifth of them found nowhere else on Earth, making it a magnet for industrial fishing fleets operating just outside its boundary.

Since 2021, Ecuador's navy has used MDA's Dark Vessel Detection platform, delivered under a CAD $7 million programme funded by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, to find vessels that switch off their location trackers near the reserve. The system fuses RADARSAT-2 synthetic-aperture radar imagery with radio-frequency and geo-spectrum sensing, using machine learning to flag likely fishing vessels that AIS data alone would miss.

In June 2022 the system helped Ecuador's navy detect roughly 180 Chinese-flagged vessels fishing for Humboldt squid near the reserve's exclusive economic zone boundary. Separately, since a 2020 memorandum of understanding with Global Fishing Watch, Ecuador has equipped more than 700 of its own domestic vessels with vessel monitoring systems and made their positions public, improving transparency around legal fishing even as the dark-vessel system targets illegal activity.

No independently published before/after statistics yet quantify a reduction in illegal fishing incidents attributable to the system; the documented detections show surveillance reach rather than a measured deterrence effect, and foreign vessels operating right at the boundary remain difficult to intercept or prosecute under international law.

Read the full analysis: https://mda.space/dark-vessel