Prince Charles claims the increase in pirates has been "fantastic" for marine life.
Prince Charles
The 68-year-old royal has appeared to credit the pirates in and around Somalia for improving the fishing stocks in the ocean around that area because fishermen are too scared to cast their nets out there over fears they will be kidnapped.
Charles told Sky News: "As a result, there hasn't been any fishing there for the last ten or 15 years. And from that there has been a fantastic explosion of bigger and bigger fish."
And in a speech made at the Our Ocean Conference in Malta, the Prince of Wales called for the protect of coral reefs as he says their economic value is highest when they are in tact.
He said: "As we have just seen, ladies and gentlemen, in that amazing, if stark, film, coral reefs are perhaps the clearest litmus tests we have to gauge progress relative to the impact of an unsustainable Blue Economy. These incredible ecosystems host about two-fifths of all marine species on just two per cent of the seabed, they protect many vulnerable coasts from storms, are nurseries for the young of commercially valuable fish and provide food and livelihoods for more than one billion people.
"Coral reefs' economic value is, then, truly vast, at least while they are still intact. The fact that we seem to have catastrophically underestimated their vulnerability to climate change, acidification and pollution and that significant portions of the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's Eastern coast have been severely degraded or lost over the last few years is both a tragedy and also, I would have thought, a very serious wake-up call. Are we really going to allow ourselves the dismal comfort of accepting that in the long run we will only be left with a tiny fraction of them?"
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