For fifty years, the sea off Ulleungdo glowed after dark. Squid boats lined the horizon, each one blazing with lamps bright enough to read by. Locals called it the second sunrise. Tourists booked ferries just to photograph it.
Today that horizon is black. The Korea squid fishing crisis has emptied it.
On one night in June 2026, exactly one squid boat worked the waters off Ulleungdo. Furthermore, it was not even a local vessel. It had sailed in from another province.
Most explanations of the Korea squid fishing crisis stop at climate change. Warmer water, fewer squid, end of story. However, that account is only half true. The other half involves a fleet of roughly 900 industrial ships that switched off their transponders, slipped into North Korean waters, and vanished from every official record on earth. Scientists eventually found them anyway — by looking down from space.
This is what actually happened to Korea’s most beloved fish.
Foreigners often underestimate squid in Korea. To be fair, it looks like a minor menu item. In reality, it functions closer to a national staple.
Grilled squid shows up at baseball games. Dried squid, or ojingeo, sits beside beer in every Korean convenience store. Shredded seasoned squid, called jinmichae, appears in millions of lunchboxes each week. Squid stew warms winter tables, and raw squid tops summer noodles.
In other words, squid is to Korea roughly what cod once was to Britain. Consequently, when squid disappears, ordinary people notice immediately — first on the plate, then in the wallet.
Korea also eats more seafood per person than almost anywhere else. Annual consumption runs near 60 kilograms per capita, against a global average close to 20. As a result, the country’s seafood industry is unusually exposed to any single species collapsing.
Squid was that species.
The squid catch decline is not gradual. Instead, it reads like a demolition.
In 2003, Korean coastal and offshore vessels landed 233,254 tons of squid. By 2018, that figure had dropped to 46,274 tons. By 2024, it reached 13,568 tons.
Meanwhile, prices went the other way. A single squid averaged 6,928 won in 2024. In March 2026, shoppers paid 8,264 won for one. Just seven months earlier, in August 2025, the same squid cost 4,419 won.
Ulleungdo tells the sharpest version of the story. The island landed 11,315 tons in 2000. Between 2023 and 2025, it averaged 112 tons. Through May 2026, the island’s boats had landed one ton.
One ton. From eleven thousand.
Local auction revenue followed. Ulleungdo’s squid sales through May 2025 came to about 164.8 million won. Through May 2026, they came to 28.5 million won — roughly one-eighth as much.
Nevertheless, 2025 offered a strange flicker of hope. National landings rebounded to 31,006 tons, more than double the previous year. Fishermen briefly wondered whether the squid had returned. Then 2026 arrived, and the numbers collapsed again.
Here the story turns strange.
For years, Korean and Japanese fishery scientists could not fully explain the East Sea squid collapse. Warming alone did not account for the speed of it. Additionally, the squid seemed to be disappearing before they ever reached Korean grounds.
Then researchers tried a different approach. Rather than counting boats from the water, they counted them from orbit.
A team led by Jaeyoon Park and David Kroodsma at Global Fishing Watch combined four separate satellite systems. They used vessel transponder data, optical imagery, night-light detection, and radar. Squid boats are unusually easy to spot at night, because their lamps are among the brightest lights humans put on the ocean.
What appeared in the data shocked them.
More than 900 industrial vessels, almost all originating from China, were fishing inside North Korean waters in 2017. Roughly 700 returned in 2018. Around 790 unique vessels operated there in 2019. Critically, most of them broadcast no public tracking signal at all. They were, in the researchers’ phrase, a dark fleet.
The catch was enormous. Over 2017 and 2018, those ships took more than 160,000 tons of Pacific flying squid, worth over $440 million. For perspective, that is nearly as much squid as Japan and South Korea landed combined.
The findings appeared in Science Advances in July 2020. Scientists described it as the largest known case of illegal fishing by a single industrial fleet inside another nation’s waters. The full media briefing remains public.
Why were Chinese ships there at all? Because someone sold them access.
Under UN Security Council sanctions adopted in 2017, North Korea may not sell fishing rights to foreign operators. In practice, it did anyway. According to analysis published by CSIS, Pyongyang earned roughly $120 million from fishing permits in 2018 alone.
Context makes that number land harder. North Korea’s estimated annual nuclear program budget sits near $642 million. Squid, therefore, was not a side business. It was national revenue.
Approximately one-third of China’s entire distant-water fleet has been linked to operations off North Korea. Moreover, Chinese vessels in those waters have at times caught more fish than South Korea and Japan together.
Squid do not respect maritime boundaries. Pacific flying squid spawn in the East China Sea, then migrate north through Korean and North Korean waters before returning south. Consequently, a fleet intercepting them in the north removes the squid that would otherwise have reached Ulleungdo, Sokcho, and Pohang later in the season.
Korean scientists have estimated that squid stocks shared across the region fell by 70 percent or more since 2003. Japan and South Korea both recorded declines of roughly 80 percent over the same period, despite tightening their own rules considerably.
In short, Korea regulated its fishermen while an invisible fleet fished upstream.
The human cost of this arrangement washed up on Japan’s beaches.
North Korean fishermen, pushed off their traditional grounds by industrial trawlers, began sailing farther out in small wooden boats. Those boats lacked GPS, radios, and reliable engines. Many never came back under their own power.
Instead, they drifted east and grounded on the Japanese coast, sometimes with bodies aboard. Japanese media named them ghost ships. In 2017, Japan recorded 104 arrivals, along with at least 31 bodies and 42 survivors. In 2019, the count exceeded 156. Over five years, more than 500 such boats were documented.
Researchers also tracked around 3,000 small North Korean vessels fishing illegally in Russian waters. They had, quite simply, nowhere else to go.
Journalists at NBC News later connected the two phenomena directly. The ghost ship phenomenon is now widely understood as a downstream effect of industrial overfishing rather than an isolated mystery.
It is, admittedly, an uncomfortable detail in a story about dinner. Nevertheless, it belongs here. The same squid that vanished from Korean markets vanished from North Korean nets first, and people died over it.
The dark fleet explains a great deal. Still, it does not explain everything. Climate finished what overfishing started.
Pacific flying squid prefer water between roughly 12 and 18 degrees Celsius. At fifty meters depth, the sweet spot narrows further, to about 14 to 16 degrees. Above that range, the squid simply move north.
The East Sea has been heating faster than most of the world’s oceans. During the 1970s, its surface exceeded 20 degrees for about 70 to 80 days a year. In the 2020s, that figure has roughly doubled to around 160 days.
Near Dokdo, monitoring stations recorded an average of 24.3 degrees in 2021 and about 25.8 degrees by 2024. Professor Hwang Ui-wook of Kyungpook National University has argued that Dokdo’s waters have already entered an early stage of subtropical transition.
The species mix is changing accordingly. Yellowtail, amberjack, and bluefin tuna now appear where squid once dominated. Fishermen in Mukho and Jumunjin have reported tuna schools that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Kelp forests, meanwhile, are bleaching out in a process Koreans call gaetnogeum.
Similar shifts are visible across Korea’s coastal ecosystems, from the Getbol tidal flats to the whale populations tracked through bycatch records. Korea’s winters are warming on the same curve, which is why the country’s snow is also disappearing.
Warming did not chase away every squid by itself. However, it shrank the habitat while the dark fleet emptied it. Together, the two forces proved far more destructive than either would have been alone.
Korean consumers absorbed the shock in stages.
At first, restaurants quietly shrank portions. Later, they swapped species. Eventually, prices moved where shoppers could not miss them.
Jinmichae, the shredded seasoned squid found in nearly every Korean fridge, offers the clearest example. A 400-gram pack sold for 12,000 to 18,000 won at major retailers not long ago. By mid-2025, the same pack ran 25,000 to 29,000 won. Statistics Korea recorded the squid snack price index at 157.05 in May 2025, a jump of 50.5 percent year on year.
Curiously, that particular spike had little to do with the East Sea. Most jinmichae is made from Humboldt squid caught off Peru and Chile. Then La Niña cooled Peruvian waters by about two degrees and wrecked the spawning season. Peru’s giant squid output fell to 1,340 tons in one month, down from 18,540 tons a year earlier.
So Korea’s backup supply failed at almost exactly the same moment as its domestic supply.
Fuel costs added a third squeeze. Tax-exempt marine diesel rose from 175,940 won per 200 liters in March to 276,180 won in April, a 57 percent increase in a single month. For a small squid boat, that alone can erase the economics of leaving port.
Wholesale volumes tell the same tale. Garak Market handled roughly 480,000 boxes of squid in 2020. Recently, that figure fell to about 180,000 boxes — a 62.5 percent contraction.
Scarcity does not distribute pain evenly. Some players in the Korean squid industry have done well out of it.
Importers, for instance, gained enormously. As domestic landings shrank, the share of squid arriving frozen from Peru, Chile, Argentina, and the Falkland grounds rose steadily. Trading firms with existing South American relationships suddenly held leverage nobody had anticipated.
Processors did reasonably well too. Frozen imported squid suits industrial production lines better than fresh domestic squid, because it arrives graded, uniform, and available year-round. Consequently, snack manufacturers and ready-meal producers adapted faster than restaurants did.
Distant-water fishing companies formed a third winner. Several Korean operators redeployed vessels toward South American squid grounds, and a few repurposed ships originally built for other species entirely.
The losers, by contrast, are concentrated and visible. Small jigging boat owners lost their livelihoods outright. Coastal auction houses lost volume. Drying yards, souvenir producers, and harbor restaurants lost the product their business depended on. Port towns lost the tourism that the fishing lights generated.
There is an uncomfortable pattern here, and it is familiar across Korean food supply chains. When a domestic resource fails, capital adapts quickly while communities do not. Seoul consumers still get squid. Ulleungdo does not get a fleet.
Investors watching the sector should note one more thing. The Korea squid fishing crisis has effectively converted a domestic harvesting business into an international sourcing business. That shift favors scale, cold-chain infrastructure, and foreign licensing relationships. Meanwhile, it steadily disadvantages anyone whose only asset is a boat and a fishing ground.
Similar dynamics are reshaping Korean protein markets more broadly. Aquaculture keeps expanding, imports keep rising, and the share of seafood actually caught by Korean coastal fishermen keeps shrinking.
No place absorbed the Korea squid fishing crisis more completely than Ulleungdo.
The island built its entire identity around squid. Drying racks lined the roads. Processing sheds employed hundreds. Souvenir shops sold nothing else. Tourists came partly to watch the fishing lights.
Now the island is dismantling its own fleet. In 2025, authorities decommissioned 13 boats at a cost of 2.89 billion won. The following program covered 28 vessels and 4.3 billion won, the largest buyback on record. Of roughly 107 registered boats, more than a quarter are waiting in line to be scrapped. In the first half of 2026, another 16 jigging boats applied.
Tourism suffered too. Visitor numbers fell 18 percent, and a viral controversy over a 170,000-won plate of ten large squid did not help. Locals argued, reasonably, that the price reflected genuine scarcity rather than gouging. Nevertheless, the damage to the island’s reputation was done.
Fishery researchers have offered a brutal assessment. Several now believe commercial recovery within fifty years is effectively impossible.
Ulleungdo is therefore doing what many Gangwon and East Coast communities are attempting: rebuilding around tourism, marine healing, and aquaculture instead of catch volume.
Seoul has not been passive about the Korea squid fishing crisis. Whether the response arrived in time is another question.
The Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries has expanded its Total Allowable Catch system substantially. For the 2026/2027 season, the ministry set a national quota of 623,079 tons across 19 species and 23 fishery types. Squid management moved up to stage three, which means real sanctions rather than warnings. By July 2030, the government intends to place all coastal and offshore fisheries under quota management.
Additional measures include closed seasons, minimum size limits, vessel buybacks, and stricter enforcement against foreign vessels. Korea’s coast guard has also detained Chinese boats operating illegally in Korean waters, though enforcement inside North Korean waters remains outside its reach.
There is also aquaculture. Korean researchers achieved full-cycle farming of cuttlefish, which was a genuine technical milestone. Common squid, unfortunately, remains far harder to farm at scale.
Distant-water fishing offers a partial substitute. Korean companies have sent vessels to South America to secure supply, which is how Peruvian squid ended up in Korean lunchboxes in the first place. Yet that strategy simply exports the vulnerability, as the 2025 La Niña demonstrated.
Recreational fishing pressure adds another layer to the problem. Korea’s seven million anglers now represent a meaningful share of coastal catch, and regulating them has proven politically awkward.
Koreans have watched a fish vanish before.
Alaska pollack, known locally as myeongtae, once defined the East Sea. It appeared in soups, stews, and ancestral rites. Then catches fell through the floor. In some recent years, domestic landings have been recorded at essentially zero, and roughly 99 percent of the pollack Koreans eat now arrives frozen from Russia.
Restoration projects have released hatchery-raised pollack for over a decade. Results remain modest.
Squid is following the same arc, only faster. Consequently, the question facing Korean fisheries policy is no longer how to bring squid back. It is which species goes next, and whether anyone will act before the graph flattens.
Sardine, mackerel, and Pacific saury are all showing distributional shifts. Tuna, on the other hand, is becoming common enough that officials have discussed treating it as an everyday fish rather than a luxury one.
That is a remarkable sentence to write about the East Sea. It is also a warning.
Practical notes, for anyone heading to Korea’s east coast.
Squid remains available everywhere. However, most of it is imported, and menus rarely say so. Fresh domestic squid appears mainly in coastal towns during autumn, and it commands a premium.
If you want the traditional experience, Sokcho, Jumunjin, and Pohang still run squid-focused markets. Ulleungdo still sells dried squid, though production has shrunk dramatically. Night fishing tours operate on a reduced schedule.
Prices will surprise you. A modest plate of fresh squid can cost more than pork belly, which reverses the traditional order of things entirely. Locals find this depressing, and they will tell you so if asked.
Finally, if you spot a horizon full of fishing lamps, take the photograph. That view used to be permanent. Now it is not.
The Korea squid fishing crisis is often filed under climate change, and warming water genuinely deserves a large share of the blame. Yet the fuller explanation includes a sanctioned state selling access to its waters, an industrial fleet fishing without transponders, and a monitoring gap that lasted years before satellites closed it.
Korea has since tightened quotas, scrapped boats, and chased supply across the Pacific. Meanwhile, the squid have moved north into waters Korean fishermen cannot legally follow.
Ulleungdo landed 11,315 tons in 2000. It landed one ton through May of 2026.
Whatever else that number represents, it is not simply the weather.
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