The fishermen in Sarodrano, a coastal village in south-west Madagascar, complain about their steadily declining catches. "On a good day, I used to catch 15kg of fish," says Melau Feaucre Johanison, a 39-year-old fisherman. "But if it is too stormy, we don't catch anything. There are some months when there is no fish at all."
Two widows, Josiany Celestinym, 60, and Vance Leonce, 41, are gleaners. They forage the shallow reefs at low tide looking for octopus, oysters and sea cucumbers. They also complain that the oysters are harder to find than they used to be.
The reasons for this decline - which researchers and conservationists agree could get far worse over the next decade - are many and various.
Together they tell a story of lacklustre monitoring, poor management and economic pressure in a country where, according to the World Bank, 92% of its 22m people lived on less than $2 a day in 2013.
The island nation of Madagascar boasts an astonishing array of plants, reptiles and mammals, including its famous baobab trees and lemurs found nowhere else on earth. But the island's geological features have also shaped an extraordinary marine life.
A wide western continental shelf is home to extensive mangrove swamps and coral reef ecosystems, which marine biologist Andrew Cooke, author of "Madagascar, a Guide to Marine Diversity", says are an important regional centre of oceanic breeding grounds, crucial to maintaining the ocean's biodiversity.
Unlike the rainforests on land, sea systems have the advantage that they can recover from degradation, Mr Cooke says. So while the rainforests on land need strict conservation, marine areas just need sustainable management.
Madagascar, however, is the world's fourth-largest island with a coastline of 4,800km, a vast stretch that the government in Antananarivo cannot patrol, police or monitor.
The country has just three vessels and nine speedboats to monitor domestic fisheries or protect its waters from illegal fishing boats, according to the University of British Columbia's Frederic Le Manach, lead author of a June 2011 study looking at fishing, hunger and political turmoil in Madagascar.
According to the study, published in the journal Marine Policy, fleets from Europe and Asia sailing Madagascar's waters since at least the 1980s have routinely underreported their hauls.
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