The Threat: Bottom trawling: a grave threat to marine life

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.