Page - June 17, 2008
The beautiful and extraordinary life in the deep sea is seriously threatened by bottom trawling, one of the most destructive fishing practices ever devised.
This piece of gorgonian coral, bigger than the two men attempting to untangle it from their fishing nets, was more than 500 years old. It was destroyed by one of the most aggressive fishing practices ever used, known as bottom trawling, and was dumped by the New Zealand vessel which dragged it up.
Armed with
acoustic fish-finders and satellite technology, trawl fishing is
now going on at greater depths than ever before in the North
Atlantic and around the world.
Bottom trawl nets are enormous. The biggest bottom
trawl nets that hit the sea floor have mouths as wide as the length
of a football field and are three storeys high. Weighted across the
bottom with heavy steel rollers that indiscriminately smash and
crush corals and other ocean bottom life, they swallow everything
in their path. To apply the same methodology on land would be like
dragging a massive net across entire fields, cities and forests in
the hope of catching a few cows.
When hauled on board, ever decreasing tonnages of
over exploited orange roughy and oreo spill across the deck, and so
too does the trawl 'trash'. This unwanted bycatch includes the
endangered deep sea reef-forming black coral, threatened giant
mussels and clams, barnacles and squid.
Bottom trawling clearcuts
the ancient coral forests of the sea. No one knows how long it
takes for these communities to recover, or even if they can.
Very little is known of deep sea fish biology, but
it is all too apparent that the fish stocks, like the ecosystem,
are collapsing.