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More powerful engines, bigger nets, precise mapping and advanced navigational and fish-finding electronics mean fishing vessels can now drag nets across the ocean floor up to two kilometres deep. This is why bottom trawling is considered the most destructive deep sea fishing technique.
Bottom trawling involves pulling huge, heavy nets along the sea floor. Large metal plates and rubber wheels attached to these nets move along the bottom and crush nearly everything in their path. Bottom trawl nets are enormous. Some nets that drag along the sea floor can have mouths the length of a rugby field.
All evidence indicates that deep water life forms are very slow to recover from such damage, taking decades to hundreds of years, if they recover at all.
Think of bottom trawling as driving a huge bulldozer through a lush and richly populated forest and being left with a flat, featureless desert. Or as beef farming by dragging a net across entire fields, cities and forests to catch a few cows.
When the nets are hauled onboard, ever-increasing tonnes of over-exploited orange roughy and oreo fish spill across the deck. So too does the trawl trash or by-catch. This unwanted life includes the deep sea reef-forming black coral, threatened giant mussels and clams, barnacles and squid. Since most of this sea life is unwanted it gets thrown overboard - dead and destroyed.
Unfortunately, once countries over-fish their own coastal waters they move out into the high seas – an area where virtually no rules govern fishing and its impacts.
Vessels flagged to only 11 countries: Spain, Russian Portugal, Norway, Estonia, Denmark/Faroe Islands, Japan, Lithuania, Iceland, New Zealand and Latvia took approximately 95 per cent of the reported high seas bottom trawl catch in 2001. The EU countries (including Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia but excluding the Faroe Islands) alone accounted for 60 per cent of this overall catch.
Bottom trawling involves pulling huge, heavy nets along the sea floor. Large metal plates and rubber wheels attached to these nets move along the bottom and crush nearly everything in their path. Bottom trawl nets are enormous. Some nets that drag along the sea floor can have mouths the length of a rugby field.
All evidence indicates that deep water life forms are very slow to recover from such damage, taking decades to hundreds of years, if they recover at all.
Think of bottom trawling as driving a huge bulldozer through a lush and richly populated forest and being left with a flat, featureless desert. Or as beef farming by dragging a net across entire fields, cities and forests to catch a few cows.
When the nets are hauled onboard, ever-increasing tonnes of over-exploited orange roughy and oreo fish spill across the deck. So too does the trawl trash or by-catch. This unwanted life includes the deep sea reef-forming black coral, threatened giant mussels and clams, barnacles and squid. Since most of this sea life is unwanted it gets thrown overboard - dead and destroyed.
Unfortunately, once countries over-fish their own coastal waters they move out into the high seas – an area where virtually no rules govern fishing and its impacts.
Vessels flagged to only 11 countries: Spain, Russian Portugal, Norway, Estonia, Denmark/Faroe Islands, Japan, Lithuania, Iceland, New Zealand and Latvia took approximately 95 per cent of the reported high seas bottom trawl catch in 2001. The EU countries (including Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia but excluding the Faroe Islands) alone accounted for 60 per cent of this overall catch.
