The ocean bottom is a world of beauty, with coral reefs, sponges, brightly colored fish, and a vast array of other sea creatures. This is a unique and varied landscape that supports an incredible amount of life in a complex ecosystem that is diverse and valuable on so many levels. It is also a target for the fishing industry and sadly, it is slowly being destroyed. The commercial fishing industry has slowly fished out the fish populations of the shallower coastal waters around the world, reducing them by as much as 90%. Since there is not much left to fish in these areas, they have turned to the bottom dwelling species, large fish, as a new source of sea food. With this comes concerns for a completely different environment, one in which vast ecosystems are at stake.
The preferred method of fishing the depths of the ocean these days is something called bottom trawling and this method of fishing does not discriminate. A five-ton trawl net is literally dragged across the ocean floor, across plateaus, ridges, and seamounts destroying everything in its path. When this bottom trawling net is used, they might only be fishing for one type of fish, such as shrimp, but everything else suffers too. When the net is brought up there is an incredible 15 tons of coral reef and other marine life that is either already dead or dying. Sometimes as much as 90% of what is caught is useless to those who are fishing, which is incredibly wasteful and destructive. In fact, this bycatch is considered waste material and once the fish they were intending to catch are removed from the “debris” in the net; everything else is thrown overboard back into the sea. If there are any creatures fortunate enough to survive that ordeal, they are left behind in a barren landscape where a vibrant ecosystem used to flourish.
Due to continuous bottom trawling on seamounts, more than 90% of deep water coral has been wiped out and areas with newly discovered fish stocks have been depleted to 15% to 30% of their initial levels within the past five years. When bottom trawling is performed many of the species that are caught in the nets as bycatch are on the endangered species list, whether they are endangered sea turtles, the sea cucumber, or any of the other endangered sea animals in the world today. The small creatures who live in the sediment on the ocean floor and whose homes are destroyed when the sediment is disturbed are also at great risk because they become exposed and suffer increased predation. There are even medicinal resources that have been untapped, but that have amazing potential as anti-cancer drugs, antibiotics, pain killers, and medicines that can be used to treat heart disease and asthma. These are simply being destroyed.
With dwindling resources in coastal waters, more and more commercial fishing operations are moving out into the high seas, which account for 64% of the earth's oceans and where there are virtually no laws to protect marine wildlife. In order to protect the high seas and the deep ocean environment, there was a conference put on by Conservation International (CI) in 2003 called Defying Ocean's End. CI is part of a steering committee of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, which is an organization of more than 50 non-governmental agencies that are working to get the United Nations to adopt a moratorium on bottom trawling to ensure the safety of the deep ocean environment in the short-term while regulations are being created and can be put into action and enforced.
Many organizations are pushing for controls on bottom trawling and to keep the practice out of environmentally sensitive areas. Bottom trawling is essentially the equivalent of sending a bulldozer through an environmentally sensitive rainforest and the result is that valuable habitat is lost; habitat that acts as the feeding and breeding grounds for so many animal species. The key is to ultimately change from the destructive bottom trawling methods to less destructive methods. This may mean lower yields or increased effort to get a good catch, but ultimately it will better preserve the ocean floor environment, which will ensure that what is caught is bigger and better and that there will always be plenty of fish in the sea.