Saving the Deep Sea

The deep ocean floor has its own mountains, called seamounts. They rise high above the surrounding seafloor.

It has been estimated that there are tens of thousands of seamounts across the world's oceans: upwards of 800 in the Atlantic Ocean, with more than 30,000 believed to be in the Pacific Ocean.

Amazingly, the Earth's longest mountain range is not on land but under the sea - the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, which winds around the globe from the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic. It is four times longer than the Andes, Rockies, and Himalayas combined.

These seamounts are uniquely rich areas of biodiversity. Their hard surfaces are colonized by colourful forests of attached cold water corals, soft seapens, sponges and seawhips, through which move more mobile animals such as sea spiders. Lobster-like crustaceans live in sheltered crevices. In the softer sediments, a dynamic community of small worms and crustaceans exists. In the waters around the seamounts live large populations of fish, swimming in the constant currents. Many seamount-dwelling species are not found anywhere else, and it is believed that some are confined to only one or two individual seamounts.

# 1 Threat: Bottom Trawling

Unfortunately, the commercial fishing industry has gotten to know about the rich pickings that exist in deep waters. The industry has developed its boats and scaled up its trawl gear to enable it to extend its unsustainable fishing practices into previously unexploited deep waters and seamounts using a technique called bottom trawling. Bottom trawling involves dragging 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. All evidence indicates that deep water lifeforms are very slow to recover from such damage, taking decades to hundreds of years - if they recover at all.

We are calling for an immediate halt to deep sea bottom trawling. If allowed to continue, the bottom trawlers of the high seas will destroy deep sea species, before we have even discovered much of what is out there. Think of it as driving a huge bulldozer through a lush and richly populated forest and being left with a flat, featureless desert. Think of it as beef farming by dragging a net across entire fields, cities and forests to catch a few cows.

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