New York Times journalists embedded with dynamite fishermen in Bohol who gave exclusive access on the condition that we not use their names or the names of the islands where they live, for fear of being arrested.

With a rubber hose attached to an air pump wedged between his teeth, and no other gear aside from a single homemade flipper and a pair of goggles, one of the fishermen sank 30 feet into the water after the bomb went off. He lurched along the ocean floor, collecting stunned and dead fish among the crevices and broken coral.

Twenty minutes later he surfaced, heaving for breath, with five high-value reef fish and 12 pounds of scad and sardines. It was a small catch. The men on the boat saved a few handfuls for their families, and sold the rest to a local trader. The two men split the earnings, about $10, between them.

The fisherman says it is the only job he knows that earns this kind of money. For legal net fishermen, six pounds of fish is a good day. Often, they come back with nothing. With dynamite fishing he can come back with 20 pounds and sometimes as much as 45 pounds, if he lucks out with a large jack or grouper.

Back on the island, one of the men lit a gas burner under a pan and used his bare hand to stir a splash of kerosene into white beads of solid ammonium nitrate. The fertilizer has been illegal in the Philippines since 2002, but the men buy sacks of it from dealers on a neighboring island.