In the late afternoon, the Soumbe-dioune Market in Dakar is mostly empty—populated by women rolling peanuts into bags as snacks, a few people brewing up vats of Cafe Touba (a spiced and sugary coffee), and others wiping down their cleaning stations in anticipation of the evening ahead. But when the sun starts to set on the Atlantic Ocean, the market comes alive. The boats pull in, bringing loads of fish in shades of orange, gray, and pink. There’s langouste and mackerel, mussels and barracuda. Massive groupers, bigger than small children, lie on concrete counters, and cases of red mullet and a spread of long, fat eels wait on the sand. Vendors position their products, calling out prices as buyers browse.

The diversity springs from Senegal’s place in the West African Ecoregion, one of the richest and most diverse fishing grounds in the world. The upwelling of cold water along the coast brings nutrients from the depths of the ocean to feed over a thousand of species of fish. Such abundance must have attracted early peoples to the coast, says Papa Gora Ndiaye, a Dakar-based economist and director of the environmental organization ENDA-REPAO. “They had only to take a tree,” he says, “cut it and put it into the ocean to take some fish.”

By the middle of the twentieth century, people in the government started to realize that the biodiversity of their waters was an asset that could be harnessed, caught, frozen, and airlifted to places in Europe or America or Asia where buyers would pay a lot of money to get it. Mamadou Goudiaby, a researcher from the Office of Maritime Fishing, says that the government hoped to develop the local economy by expanding the fishery and making small-scale fishermen more efficient. “At the beginning, we said the fishery resources were not sufficiently exploited,” said Goudiaby. “And the government put programs into place to be able to exploit the fishery.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, the government helped small fishermen buy motors so they could go farther out into the ocean. At the same time, the region suffered from a major drought that drove farmers to the coasts, where they thought they could find sure survival and a new career in the sea. And individual fishermen began to prosper. In a small village called Nianing, Mansour Thiaow says that they learned to fish for those foreign markets.

Together Mansour Thiaow and his brothers own six pirogues, small, wooden fishing boats, painted bright blue inside and festooned with the red, yellow, and green Senegalese flags on the outside. The Thiaows fish for everything and anything: giant squid for local hotels, huge mollusks prized as aphrodisiacs by buyers in Japan, and lots and lots of octopus. That’s one of the big money makers.

He says that the fishermen only recently learned how profitable octopus could be. “Gradually, people came and said, ‘Wait, this octopus is commercial.’ So we had to create techniques to attract the octopus and to send it to the European, Asian, or American markets.”

Thiaow says that his family has done well. “Before, there wasn’t any electricity at our house. For us, it was candles. Now there is electricity,” he says. “There wasn’t water. We went over there,” he says gesturing to the ocean. “Now there is a tap at the house. There is a telephone. There are plenty of little things.”

Nianing is south of Dakar in an area they call the Petit Côte—the Little Coast. It’s a region in transition, where old fishermen in knit caps and sweaters share the beaches with bikini-clad sunbathers, where shanties sit next to gated resorts. The main activity of the people here, though, is still fishing.

The governmental strategy to expand the fishery included opening it up to outsiders. Starting in 1979, Senegal signed agreements that, for a fee, allowed foreign fleets to fish Senegalese waters. This expansion meant a rapid and exponential increase in how much fish trawlers and pirogues were taking out of Senegal’s waters. In 1965, the total catch was estimated at some 50,000 metric tons. By 2000, the official catch had ballooned to 390,000 metric tons, most of it from the efforts of small fishermen like Mansour Thiaow.

But the official numbers don’t tell the whole story. In fact, Papa Gora Ndiaye from ENDA-REPAO says that record keeping is a serious problem. “It’s difficult to get the resource data on the volumes captured by the industrial fleet,” he explains. We know that some of the industrial fishing tonnage never sees a Senegalese port and is instead taken straight to Europe or Asia. Maybe most of it. And illegal fishing by huge foreign boats is so widespread that those catches probably dwarf the official numbers.

So, even though the small-scale fishing fleet is active—and its catches alarmingly high—Ndiaye says that the greater risk is the commercial fishing fleet, whose catch is likely far higher and drastically underreported. “You can not compare an industrial fishing boat with a pirogue,” says Ndiaye. “The capacity of that boat is a hundred times the capacity of a pirogue.”

In short, for decades fishermen in and around Senegal have been taking more out of the ocean than can possibly be replenished. Researchers say that stocks of sought-after fish, what the Senegalese call the “noble species,” are especially over-exploited. That includes the octopus that spruced up the Thiaow family home, and it includes the thiof (white grouper), a fish of Senegalese dreams and aspirations. Indeed, overfishing threatens nearly all the commercial fish in Senegal’s waters—cuttlefish, sole, shrimp, and many others. And it threatens the future of fishing itself in villages across the country.

I’m lost. It’s a Sunday afternoon in the coastal village of Ngor, and I can’t find the beach. It shouldn’t be hard, but from the village center where the buses and taxis stop, you have to walk down a narrow passageway that connects to another narrow alley, past food stands with goat meat sandwiches, past little stores that sell phone cards and Fanta and bags of water, to the area where the inns and hotels begin to hug the shore. There, at last, Ngor juts out on the western edge of the Cap Vert peninsula into the Atlantic Ocean. It and other nearby villages were settled in the fifteenth or sixteenth century by the Lébou people, who were, as lore has it, the original fishermen of Senegal, and fishing is still their principal livelihood.

Mamadou Sène saves me from my wandering. He’s lounging in a pirogue on a beach crowded with such boats, although not as many as I’d hoped. Sène says he knows why. “There’s not a lot of fish in comparison to before. It’s very disturbing,” he says. “There are some fishermen who have stopped fishing.”

He’s one of them. He used to fish like most of the men in the village, but now works as a cook at a local restaurant. When he was a boy, he says, the fishermen could fish near the shore, and they collected more fish than they could eat. The prices were low then, he says, so people had to bring in more fish to make a profit. Now the prices are higher, but there aren’t many fish to be had.

Small fishermen like the ones from Ngor have been crying foul. They have been wondering about the industrial fishing boats taking more than their fair share, about the fishing agreements with EU countries whose trawlers lick the ocean clean, about the illegal fishing by other foreign boats whose lights you can see twinkling offshore at night.

Sène says that a small fisherman’s life is too tough in Senegal now. He misses the old days, “when there was fish up to here,” he says, gesturing to his chest; when the Lébou rebelled against foreign rule and fought the colonialists (both African and European). Now the hotels and the rich people’s homes are crowding out the regular fishing folk of Ngor.

The tourism industry brought jobs, though, and some people took them. But there are still many in Senegal who, bound by tradition or predilection or desperation, prefer to depend on the sea. Fish and fish products are the country’s main export and represent more than 10 percent of the primary GDP. Fishermen and the extended sector of fish sellers and processors employ more than 15 percent of the nation’s working population, not a small number since the national unemployment rate hovers around 50 percent.

As we speak, a couple of fishermen in wetsuits drag their pirogue from the water to an open space next to us. There are bows and metal tubes of oxygen in their boat. They have been scuba diving for big fish. But they didn’t find any today.