Trepang

Until today I'd never seen a grown man put his hands into the digestive tract of a sea cucumber, scoop out the innards, and sink the creature into boiling water. I may never again.

Soon after daybreak were down at the beach landing area in the community we're working with to get a rough assessment of the sizes of their catch, such as by measuring this sea cucumber. The fishers have told us that when people are coming into their waters, things are being overfished, they come home with less, and find it harder to earn money. If measurement of weight and size of catches can become more of a standard monitoring activity, we should be able to show a link between the patrols that we hope to reintroduce (thereby making it easier to enforce rules against the illegal fishers) and improved catches.

The largest challenge remains making the whole system sustainable and that the community itself mustn't over-fish its hopefully soon-to-be improved stocks if resources are to remain robust in the long term.

Sea cucumbers come in a range of fantastically ugly and slobbery varieties. We were taken to one of the fishers' homes where he was preparing the sea cucumbers to be boiled and then smoked over a hot fire. Specimens are usually sent on by collectors to the trading hub of Medan and onwards to China.