{"id":6895,"date":"2016-07-08T16:50:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T16:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.p4.greenpeace.org\/post\/7-ways-fishing-trawlers-are-bad-news-for-the-seabed\/"},"modified":"2019-11-06T09:49:19","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T08:49:19","slug":"7-ways-fishing-trawlers-are-bad-news-for-the-seabed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/story\/6895\/7-ways-fishing-trawlers-are-bad-news-for-the-seabed\/","title":{"rendered":"7 ways fishing trawlers are bad news for the seabed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Carl

Conservationist and writer Carl Safina sits in an inflatable at Smeerenbergfjorden, on the northwest coast of Svalbard.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m writing this in the high Arctic at 78\u00ba North Latitude in early July, aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise where I\u2019m a guest for a few days, with 24-hour daylight and gleaming glaciers in the valleys of snow-capped coastal mountains. We\u2019re here because shrinking sea ice and warming ocean water is moving fish farther north, and fishing vessels are coming with them.<\/p>\n

These are big trawling ships, and in other regions trawl-fishing has harmed\u2014in some cases ruined\u2014vast areas of seafloor. Here there\u2019s still a chance to get it right by letting trawlers work in some areas and designating other areas as trawl-free zones. We\u2019re here to document the trawling and help advance the discussion.<\/p>\n

\"Bottom

Russian bottom trawler with the catch hauled onto deck, at Sjubrebanken on the west coast of Svalbard in Norway.<\/p><\/div>\n

Trawling at its most basic it\u2019s a boat pulling a net through the water. Sometimes that net is midway between surface and seafloor. Sometimes\u2014most of the time, actually\u2014it\u2019s dragged across the seafloor. Trawls have been called \u201cbulldozers of the ocean<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently some big retailers like McDonald\u2019s and the major fishing companies of Norway and Russia have entered into an agreement with Greenpeace<\/a> to not expand further until an agreement can be reached to put some big areas here aside, safe from trawling.<\/p>\n

Trawling is one of the most basic and most effective ways of catching sea life. If you\u2019ve eaten fish, most were probably caught by trawling. Here are some major issues:<\/p>\n

1. Overfishing.<\/strong> Millions of tons of sea life find themselves engulfed in trawl nets each year. Trawling has been done so intensively that it\u2019s depleted many kinds of fish in many parts of the world. Catches must be strictly managed or in a few years there\u2019ll be little left.<\/p>\n

\"Fishing

Northern Gannets fly over the German flagged trawler Maartje Theadora as it fishes for herring.<\/p><\/div>\n

2. Untargeted, unwanted catch, or \u201cbycatch.\u201d<\/strong> Regardless of different variations in method, the one thing all trawlers have in common is that they basically core a hole through the ocean, so they catch a lot of things they\u2019re not trying to catch\u2014unmarketable fish, marine mammals, even seabirds. In some fisheries the catch is pretty \u201cclean.\u201d But in many, more than half of what trawls catch is unwanted. Virtually all of a trawl\u2019s catch comes up dead or fatally injured, and if it\u2019s unwanted it\u2019s just shoveled back. Shrimp fishing can be some of the worst, because small mesh also catches small fish. And large fish. At times, they can catch 10 fish for each single shrimp. Many are babies of large species, and have no market. Out come the shovels. I\u2019ve seen it many times.<\/p>\n

\"Trawler

Trawler discarding 60 tonnes of sardines off the coast of Africa.<\/p><\/div>\n

3. \u00a0Destabilization of the seafloor.<\/strong> If the net is dragged, it is weighted. It plows heavily along the seafloor. Most of the deeper ocean seafloor has extremely stable natural conditions. Stable currents, stable temperature (it\u2019s cold; things grow slowly). Not much happens to disturb the peace. Enter: disturbance-trawlers.<\/p>\n

\"Bottom

Bottom Trawling<\/p><\/div>\n

4. Coral damage.<\/strong> Corals aren\u2019t just for tropical reefs. Many coral species have specialized to grow in deep, cold water. Those <\/em>corals often continue growing for centuries<\/em> (I\u2019ve read that they can be thousands of years old)\u2014until the moment a trawl snaps and crushes them. Off Florida and New Zealand, deep corals have been 97-99 percent destroyed by trawling (Allsopp et al. State of the World\u2019s Oceans, 2009, Springer). This is where fish live and hide; it\u2019s their habitat. These deep reefs and coral groves are among the oldest old-growth on Earth. And there are many kinds of soft<\/em> corals too. That word \u201csoft\u201d can help you guess what happens when a heavy trawl net comes plowing through.<\/p>\n

\"Arctic

Underwater image of a soft coral Gersemia rubiformis and feather star Heliometra glacialis. Image taken on the little known seabed of the Arctic Ocean, north of Svalbard.<\/p><\/div>\n

5. Destroying anemones, sponges, sea pens, urchins, and other fine, fragile-bodied animals<\/strong>. A lot of the seafloor harbors delicate upstanding creatures. Woe unto them; they shall be felled.<\/p>\n

6. Crushing life within the seabed.<\/strong> Trillions of shelled or soft-bodied animals like worms, amphipods, clams, crabs, lobsters, and many others live in the seafloor in their quiet burrows, minding their own business and hiding. Quite crushable. This fauna is also food for fish and crabs. So even if you don\u2019t care, even if you just want to catch or eat fish\u2014if your method of catching fish kills the food of fish and ruins the places where fish live and hide, there won\u2019t be as many fish to catch. In that sense, trawling can be like sawing off the tree-limb you\u2019re standing on. So where trawlers trawl and what trawlers do makes a big difference to our ocean and our food supply. That\u2019s why we need trawling-free areas.<\/p>\n

\"Flabellina

Flabellina Polaris, Arctic Ocean,<\/p><\/div>\n

7. Justice for all.<\/strong> Shocking perhaps, but the world wasn\u2019t made just for those of us who happen to be here right now. The world was here and doing just fine for millions of years before we showed up. These trawling ships have been around for just a few decades. There are many people alive who were alive when the first big trawlers went to sea. And there will be many people alive in the future who will get what we leave and won\u2019t get what we ruin. We can take care of the place, or we can wreck it. It\u2019s really a deeply moral consideration. But there\u2019s nothing that says the world owes us all the fish in the sea. Leaving some space in the sea is the smart\u2014and the decent\u2014thing to do.<\/p>\n<\/lite-youtube>\n

Carl Safina is a writer and conservationist, and founder of The Safina Center<\/a>. He is currently a guest on board the Arctic Sunrise off the coast of Svalbard, Norway.<\/em><\/p>\n

A version of this article was first published by National Geographic, 4th July 2016.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m writing this in the high Arctic at 78\u00ba North Latitude in early July, aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise where I\u2019m a guest for a few days, with 24-hour daylight and gleaming glaciers in the valleys of snow-capped coastal mountains. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":9746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_planet4_optimize_post_is_variant":false,"_planet4_optimize_experiment_name":"","_planet4_optimize_variant_name":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"p4_og_title":"","p4_og_description":"","p4_og_image":"","p4_og_image_id":"","p4_seo_canonical_url":"","p4_campaign_name":"","p4_local_project":"","p4_basket_name":"","p4_department":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70,99,73],"tags":[85,86,19],"p4-page-type":[59],"class_list":["post-6895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature","category-ships","category-social-and-economic-systems","tag-oceans","tag-food","tag-arctic-sunrise","p4-page-type-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6895"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26153,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6895\/revisions\/26153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6895"},{"taxonomy":"p4-page-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/p4-page-type?post=6895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}