When the sea boils

Walk down to any landing wharf along the Iloilo coast before sunrise. You can see it in the posture of the men tying up their outriggers. The sea is running a fever. The bancas are coming back empty.

We finally have the numbers to prove it. In 2024, Iloilo’s municipal marine fisheries production plummeted by 44 percent. Across Western Visayas, small fishers lost nearly a quarter of their yield. The regional catch dropped from 96,307 metric tons to a dismal 73,125.

But if you ask the government exactly why we lost over 23,000 metric tons of fish, you get blank stares. Oceana blames illegal commercial fishing and overfishing. UP MSI oceanographer Dr. Charina Lyn Amedo-Repollo points to ocean heat, but admits the country lacks local studies linking heatwaves directly to marine die-offs. Up north, a PCAARRD team found 77 percent of hard corals bleached in 2024. Down here in Panay? We have no idea. We cannot decide which crisis to fight first if we cannot separate heat damage from a plundered sea.

The clock is running out. PAGASA expects a severe El Niño to grip us from this month through January 2027. Amedo-Repollo expects Iloilo’s waters to peak by January or February, which gives us exactly three months.

UP MSI deserves credit for getting their national marine heatwave tracker online. But the version built specifically for Iloilo remains hidden. Open the gates and free the local data. Hand it over to newsrooms and municipal disaster officers. Let us build automated early-warning tools so we can ping a fisherman’s phone before he wastes his last PHP 500 on fuel chasing fish that already fled.

Governors and mayors have until October 16 to submit their 2027 executive budgets. Which municipality actually put a temperature logger in the water today? Which agriculture office budgeted for one? Local executives routinely approve millions of pesos for cosmetic projects. Yet when scientists ask for funding for coastal monitoring systems, the room goes quiet.

We know the scientific fixes. Expand marine protected areas; enforce closed seasons. But those solutions come with a brutal price tag, and the steepest bill lands squarely on the fisher. The Visayan Sea closed season for sardines already runs from November to February. If we take away their remaining fishing grounds during the exact same months when extreme heat makes the catch even leaner, we are legislating starvation. A rule demanding the poorest households absorb the heat alone will simply be ignored.

Fishers have to eat in February too. We can force them out of the water to save the reefs, but only if real livelihood support comes with it.

The waters off Panay are not cooling down. The only open question is whether our leaders will keep sleepwalking until our nets bring back nothing but jellyfish and warm foam.