Surviving Piracy and the Coronavirus Pandemic

As with other elements of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), building and sustaining the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array (GTMBA) has had its own set of challenges. Moored buoys are fish aggregation devices, so they attract fishermen who often either intentionally or inadvertently damage the moorings. Fishing vandalism is the greatest source of data and equipment loss in the array, and it has no easy solution. Deploying and recovering deep ocean moorings requires specially equipped research vessels with the necessary size, endurance, and speed to carry out operations safely and efficiently. Such ships are in high demand and in short supply. Likewise, maintaining adequate funding levels to support a network of 100 or more moorings in the global tropics has always been difficult. The funding and ship time challenges have been mitigated in part by the formation of multi-national partnerships that underpin the success of the overall venture. Two challenges unique to the past decade, however, have been piracy and the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.