Bottom trawling
Beam trawling
Gill netting
Industrial fishing
Purse-seining
Overfishing
What not to eat
One of the most destructive methods of catching fish is bottom trawling.
The biggest bottom trawl nets have mouths as wide as the length of a rugby field. Weighted with heavy metal rollers, the nets smash and crush everything in their path as they indiscriminately swallow vast quantities of marine life.
If the same technique were used on land, it would be like dragging a vast net across the countryside - crushing trees, farms and wildlife in the process - to catch a few cowsAs you can see from the video, bottom trawling can plough huge furrows into the seabed. Trawl scars can be up to 4km long. And it's unbelievably wasteful - destroying fragile corals and smashing rock formations, as well as tonnes of fish and other animals as so-called bycatch. Bottom trawlers usually fish for particular species such as plaice, hake or sole, but they are normally only a small part of the catch. In 2004 it was reported that bottom trawling killed up to 16lb of other animals in order to produce just 1lb of marketable sole. Most of the dead or dying marine animals are considered worthless and dumped over the side.
Almost 1500 scientists from 69 countries have called for protection for marine ecosystems from bottom-trawling. In his book, The Unnatural History of the Sea, Professor Callum Roberts paints a memorable picture of the scene aboard a bottom trawler as the catch is hauled in:
Apart from the feeble flap of a fin here and there, and the jerking death struggle of a starfish, the catch seems lifeless. Few animals survive ascent from such great pressures. Most fish lie with mouths agape, tongues forced from their heads by bloated swim bladders and sightless eyeballs starting from their sockets. … branches of pink bamboo corals, torn sponges and coiled sea fans, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, crabs with first-sized bodies attached to long slender broken legs, deep-water sharks with humped backs and hooded silver eyes, slime-wrapped hagfish and gargoyle-faced grotesques with names only scientists would know.
Waste on such a gargantuan scale is not remotely sustainable. Scientists are predicting that unless we take urgent action, all of the world’s current fisheries could collapse by 2048. As Professor Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre has remarked, the only seafood left for us to eat would be plankton stew.
But it doesn't have to be like this. We know that fish stocks and the fishing industry can recover. The solution is a combination of no-take marine reserves and sustainable fishing.
