Tanks, wagons and garbage trucks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Crews also dropped 273 train wagons and 198 garbage trucks into the sea that year, the study says. Its authors wrote that the structures went down “to improve fish productivity for local fisheries.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The drop belonged to a royal project that rebuilt coastal fisheries in Pattani and Narathiwat from 2002 to 2015. The Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center<\/a> lists 5,318 concrete blocks, 881 used train cars, 590 used cars and 25 military tanks. They are spread across 101 fish habitats, and just one of those habitats is made of tanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thailand has sunk artificial reefs since 1978, mainly for small-scale fisheries. Florida plans to sink the SS United States to build what would be the world’s largest artificial reef<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Felipe Mattos, then in the Taiwan International Graduate Program at Academia Sinica, wrote the study. His co-author was Thamasak Yeemin of the Marine Biodiversity Research Group at Ramkhamhaeng University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Volunteers from the group Save Our Seas invited them on the trip. The Thai government funded the research through the university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tanks sit on sand roughly 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) out, 72 to 75 feet (22 to 23 meters) down. Each hull runs about 20 feet (6 meters) without its cannon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Visibility was around 33 feet (10 meters). Divers can swim from the tanks to the wagons, which lie some 164 feet (50 meters) away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One surveyor did all the counts, starting on top of a structure and swimming once around it. The diver then looked inside and, at the tanks, checked underneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A free swim of about 15 minutes followed, until the time limit for that depth ran out. It turned up 13 more species, and doubtful fish were checked later against photos and identification books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Snappers topped the list with seven species. All 53 species also live on natural coral reefs, which led the pair to call it “a typical reef associated community.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inside and around the tanks there were 21.2 fish per cubic meter. The wagons held 4.9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three species did most of the crowding. They were a small damselfish, Neopomacentrus cyanomos, the bigeye snapper Lutjanus lutjanus and the cardinalfish Taeniamia fucata. Big snapper schools showed up only at the tanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Divers off Taiwan have watched grouper and snapper mass around wind turbine foundations<\/a> on flat sand in much the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mattos and Yeemin credit the tank’s “sheltered interior area and several holes.” The cave-like space inside is also “ideal for nocturnal fishes that rest during daytime,” they wrote. The cardinalfish is one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tucked inside one tank, the diver photographed a zebra lionfish (Dendrochirus zebra). Nobody had recorded that species inside the Gulf of Thailand before, the paper says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pair used Shannon’s index, which measures how evenly fish are spread among species. It scored the wagons at 1.45 and the tanks at 1.27, a gap their statistics test did not back up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Five species made up nearly 98 percent of everything counted at the tanks. At the wagons the share was about 88 percent, and fish moved in groups of fewer than 50.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seven structures, one trip and one diver make a small sample out of the hundreds of vehicles sunk in 2010. The authors call their work “a preliminary study” and did not measure catches, survival or spawning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Few gobies turned up, which the paper puts down to the lack of small crevices and holes in the structures. The area also has no coral, and that probably keeps out damselfish that live among corals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A humphead parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum), listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List<\/a>, did swim past the wagons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reefs that only pull fish together can make them easier to catch, warn guidelines from the International Maritime Organization and the UN Environment Programme<\/a>. The guidelines want such reefs run under a fisheries management system. Florida learned what poor planning costs after millions of tires were dumped to build a reef<\/a> in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Divers and fishing surveys for the royal project found 188 fish species across its reef areas in 2015. On some train-car reefs, the walls and roofs had already caved in.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA dive at 72 feet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Snapper schools at the tanks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Zebra](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/zebra-lionfish-inside-tank.jpg\")
Wagons score 1.45<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
No catch records yet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n