·
The
article argues that bottom
trawling, a fishing method that drags heavy nets across the
seabed, should be banned due to its severe environmental impacts.
·
Bottom
trawling accounts for about 25%
of the world's wild-caught seafood but causes widespread
destruction by capturing, injuring, or killing nearly all marine life in its
path.
·
An
estimated 19 million
tonnes of marine organisms are caught annually through bottom
trawling, with an additional 6–7
million tonnes of unwanted bycatch discarded back into the sea
dead or dying.
·
A
major study by researchers at University
of British Columbia found that around 3,000 marine species are
caught in bottom trawls every year.
·
At
least one in seven species
caught is considered vulnerable to extinction.
·
Much
of the bycatch is processed into animal feed or surimi, masking the true
ecological cost of seafood products.
·
Large-scale
industrial bottom trawling expanded globally from the 1950s as developed
countries promoted the practice in developing nations.
·
Marine
scientist Daniel Pauly
argues that bottom trawling devastates seabed ecosystems and contributes to
fishery collapses.
·
The
article cites the collapse of Newfoundland’s cod fishery, where centuries of
sustainable fishing were followed by rapid depletion after the arrival of
industrial-scale trawlers.
·
Bottom
trawling is also described as one of the most
carbon-intensive fishing methods.
·
Fisheries
scientist Ray Hilborn
contends that well-managed bottom-trawl fisheries can be sustainable and that
some seabed habitats recover relatively quickly.
·
Supporters
argue that improved trawling technologies can reduce ecological damage.
·
Critics
counter that even managed trawling contributes to the long-term degradation and
"de-wilding" of marine ecosystems.
·
The
article compares bottom trawling to historical practices later restricted or
banned, including:
o Commercial whaling,
o The plume trade in wild birds,
o Use of the pesticide DDT.
·
It
argues that significant environmental recovery occurred only after strong
regulatory action or outright bans.
·
Around
80% of seafood consumed in
the United States is imported, and much of it may originate
from bottom-trawled fisheries.
·
The
author proposes mandatory seafood labeling that would
disclose:
o Whether seafood was caught through bottom
trawling,
o The environmental impacts of the fishing
method,
o The species affected as bycatch.
·
Greater
transparency could encourage consumers to make more environmentally conscious
seafood choices.
·
The
article presents bottom trawling as one of the most destructive industrial
fishing practices, threatening marine biodiversity, damaging seabed ecosystems,
and generating massive bycatch.
·
It
calls for stronger regulations, improved transparency, and ultimately a global
movement toward ending or significantly restricting bottom trawling to protect
ocean ecosystems.
[ABS News Service/10.06.2026]
We
humans are capable of enormous devastation, but every now and then, we’re able to
agree to stop the worst of our transgressions. We no longer regularly scour the
oceans for the great whales only to boil them down for margarine and pet food. We’ve
stopped killing wild birds en masse to make hats out of
their plumage. We’ve effectively banned DDT — a pesticide that nearly emptied the
skies of hawks, falcons and even the bald eagle.
Bottom
trawling — a destructive industrial fishing practice that indiscriminately brings
to market about a quarter of the world’s wild-caught seafood — should be next. A
bottom trawl is a weighted net that is often wider than a football field. As it
is dragged along the sea floor, the trawl captures, kills or maims everything in
its path. Around 19 million tons of marine life meets its end this way every year
— that’s more than the combined weight of all the people in Brazil. At least another
six to seven million tons of unwanted organisms are killed annually and dumped overboard.
If a similar technique were deployed in the Amazon, people might be more likely
to recoil from the mangled pulp of jaguars, toucans, sloths and trees deemed necessary
sacrifices to bring meat to market. At our seafood counters, we never see the mangled
pulp. Underwater, ignorance is bliss.
This
year, that ignorance has been dealt a significant blow. In a major global study
of bottom trawling, researchers at the University of British Columbia combed through
years of international catch data and found that 3,000 different species are caught
in bottom trawls each year. At least one in seven was vulnerable to extinction.
As dogged as the researchers were, even they could not parse all the death. “An
undifferentiated mass of diverse marine life,” they write, is typically sloughed
off for animal feed and “surimi” (the pink mush that’s in your California sushi
roll).
When
humans do bad things, we often console ourselves that such things were always done.
And bottom trawling has existed since the 14th century. Yet, as a planet-wide undertaking,
the large-scale dragging of the seabed is quite young. Beginning in the 1950s, Western
countries deployed experts to poorer nations to teach fishers how to bottom trawl.
The ecologist Daniel Pauly, one of today’s most outspoken critics of commercial
fishing, was one of those experts. Any illusions he’d had about the long-term sustainability
of this kind of industrial fishing were shattered in Indonesia when, he has said,
he witnessed “essentially the bottom of the sea” coming up in the nets. Not only
is bottom trawling among the most carbon-intensive fishing methods, but its effects
can wreck the economies it was intended to bolster. The codfish shoals of Newfoundland,
Dr. Pauly told me in a recent call, supported awe-inspiring hand-line catches and
smaller-scale trawling for 500 years. Just a few decades after the first super-sized
factory ships arrived on the scene, the grounds were shut down. There were hardly
any fish left.
The
other excuse often ventured about the bad things we do is that they can at least
be mitigated. The University of Washington’s Ray Hilborn, a frequent opponent of
Dr. Pauly’s in fish fights, argues that “well-managed bottom trawl fisheries” are
often sustainable. And it’s certainly true, as Dr. Hilborn maintains, that seafloors
differ. Sandy bottoms recover more quickly from trawling than reefs, for example.
It’s also true that trawling technology can be improved so that nets don’t cause
quite so much damage. Even in the worst cases, Dr. Hilborn concludes, the species
diversity after trawling is better “than any form of crop production.” Prairies
remade as agribusiness cornfields, he notes, have a species diversity of one: corn.
But
Dr. Hilborn’s terrestrial analogy is, for lack of a better word, shallow. It disregards
a more profound history. Before we transformed so many land-based ecosystems into
agricultural fields, we first emptied them. Whether it was the extirpation of bison
from the Great Plains or the clear-cutting of Pacific Northwest old growth, the
eradication of endemic flora and fauna was the first step in de-wilding the land.
There are few better ways to de-wild a marine environment than to bottom trawl it.
Dr. Hilborn and others have noted that large portions of the world’s continental
shelves have never been trawled. Rather than taking that as an opportunity for yet
more fishing, perhaps we could imagine those seabeds as
something precious to be protected.
In
my 20 years of covering oceans, I’ve seen all kinds of destruction. I have stood
on the deck of a Louisiana shrimp trawler and watched 10 pounds of wildlife shoveled dead off the deck for every pound of shrimp that went
in the hold. As an apprentice field researcher for the Bureau of Land Management
surveying the riverside along salmon habitat, I saw whole stands of old-growth trees
obliterated in clear-cuts. I noted down how many 200-year-old stumps were left behind
and how the tangled slag of the forest lay across the land, too gruesome to contemplate
for very long.
Arguments
in favor of accommodation and compromise have been made
about essentially every environmental problem — and they almost never achieve their
goals. In the first part of the 20th century, at the height of the slaughter of
Antarctic whales, one Norwegian scientist argued that a sustainable whaling industry
was possible. The global collapse of that so-called fishery proved him wrong. The
whales began to recover only after a near-total worldwide ban on whaling was put
in place.
Can
we end bottom trawling and grant lasting protection to the bottom of the sea, just
as the 1987 Montreal Protocol banished the chemicals that cooled our refrigerators
and thus saved the ozone layer? In a cynical world where bottom trawling occurs
even in designated marine protected areas, skepticism
abounds. Banning trawling outright has “never had any traction,” the marine ecologist
Boris Worm told me recently. “It’s a little bit like saying we want to ban plastic.
Or gasoline.”
Maybe
so. But regulators in wealthier countries could start by telling us what we’re eating.
Around 80 percent of the seafood Americans buy is imported; much of that is bottom
trawled. We are a bit like the French police prefect in “Casablanca,” pocketing
his winnings even as he says that he is “shocked, shocked” to learn that gambling
is going on. We eat seafood from trawlers operating across the world, then claim
ignorance of the brutality it takes to get it to market. What if all industrially
procured seafood bore a label explaining exactly how it was caught? What if, when
we sat down to a bottom-trawled dinner, we knew the list of species that had perished
so that one fillet could make its way to our table — an echo of prior awareness
campaigns that helped protect threatened fish?
Knowing
what we now know, I think we might choose to order something else.