#destructive fishing

[thepastisalreadywritten]

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Thank you Spain for just doing the right thing. 🇪🇸

No more heavy trawls scraping the seabed. No more constant pressure on the surrounding fragile fish and coral. This helps the dolphins there survive too.

This expansion means 22.45% of Spain's waters are now protected, a huge step toward the EU's goal to reach 30% by 2030. 🌊👏🏼👏🏼🌊

[chaoticconnoisseurgiver]

Stoppt die Grundschleppnetzfischerei!

Mach mit! Grundschleppnetzfischerei zerstört unseren Meeresboden. Unterschreibe die Petition, um Grundschleppnetzfischerei zu beenden. #BanB

[gvantho]

DEADFINZ

Artwork by Rita Kirkman. lower the death curtain, catch ‘em all, they swarm too fast, in an electric ball, how to catch ‘em all? shoot poison into the water, watch as they swim to a pause, stunned, cyanide finz unable to creak and move, catch ‘em all! want the flash and bang, how about an underwater firework show, a bomb for all fish, scoop them up as they float to the surface, cold and thick. trawl it, nets reaching the horizon, and uproot everything in the water, coral homes, razed, rare beauties, wasted, collateral damage, catch ‘em all!

[coralreefsoftheworld-blog]

Destructive fishing comes in many forms and all are harmful to the coral reefs as well as their inhabitants. Many of them are illegal, but this hasn't stopped the fishing industries or small-scale fisherman from breaking the law to profit. A few of the methods the fishing industry use are bottom trawling, by-catch, poison, explosives, and ghost fishing. Bottom trawling is an industrial standard method where a large net with weights is drug across the seabed, collecting everything in its path; such as fish, coral, crustaceans, and other marine life. By-catch is used by both industrial and small-time fisheries; and albeit unintentional, leaves many wounded and dead marine life behind. Because they are selective about what species remain in the boat. Cyanide Poisoning is a devastating technique in fishing. It is an age old practice that had grown and expanded over the years. Plant-based product has moved into industrial grade cyanide, killing and stunning Reef fish for aquariums and boutique restaurants. Explosives have been used to make fishing an easy task as multiple sticks of dynamite is set off on the sea floor. This allows fisherman to scoop up stunned and dead fish as they ascend from the depths. Lastly there is ghost fishing. Destructive trapping of fish and marine life. Large discarded nets lay on the reefs and seabeds, capturing and stranding marine life. These creatures are left indefinitely to die. Destructive fishing methods are accelerating along with the destruction of marine life such as; coral reefs and their ecosystems. The practices are terrible now and continue to grow threatening the future of the worlds seas and oceans. Unless a world ban and or regulation of these practices are enforced, marine populations will decline to unsustainable levels and species are headed for extinction, along with seafaring communities.

While each form of destructive fishing maybe just as harmful as the next, what separates one method from another is, how they effect the coral reefs and its inhabitants. Starting with bottom trawling, as mentioned above a large net is swept across the ocean floor collecting anything and everything. At first some minor benefits can be touted, since trash as well as fish can both be collected at once. The trash is not a profitable persuit, so the deficits are the greater effects on the underwater ecosystems. Clearly they outweigh the benefits. 800,000,000 pounds of marine life were brought up from the floors in 2007 according to the Marine Conservation Institute. Not only amphibians, crustaceans, fish and mammals and are is killed by this type of harvesting, but, life giving coral reefs are too. After the nets have scrapped across the bottom, sediment is thrown up from its once settled position causing debris, toxins and choking turbid water across the reefs. As the sediment is churned up, the natural environment of the marine life is darker and polluted. This leads to habitat and shelter loss. According to a study conducted in Alaska, 55% of cold-water coral was damaged by one pass of a bottom trawling ship. Even years later, none of the coral had recovered. Scars up to 4km long were discovered in the reefs of the north-eastern Atlantic oceans, many from the use of bottom-trawling. "Like removing forest, removing this habitat decreases the area available for marine species to live and thrive in." says the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Bans have been placed on bottom-trawling by the National Legislature but the industries still continue due to rising demands for seafood.

Seafood can be a good meal for those who enjoy fish, crustaceans, and other underwater creatures. Although, when captains are selective about what they keep and what they kill and or discard, by-catch becomes a big problem. Too often Captains are picky about what creatures stay on the boat, and or have no more room in their boat, and or are not licensed to bring certain fish back to shore. This increase the amount of dead and wounded fish in the ocean. Fish, turtles, birds, and other marine life are often wounded or killed then tossed back into the ocean. While it can be understandable that they can not bring them back to land without license or there is no room, throwing dead or wounded animals back into the ocean needs to be minimized. Of the 800 Millions of tons of marine life caught, millions are thrown back into the waters each year. If the fishers were to modify their equipment to lessen the amount of by-catch, it would decrease the collateral damage. Some fisherman have modified their equipment to release turtles, dolphins and other sea life; and for good reasons. If too much by-catch occurs where they are employed, they could be out of a job. Since by-catch is often a result of other fishing methods and the dead and damaged is high. With non-target specific fishing gear such as bottom-trawling and gill-nets, it is easy to catch unwanted or undesired fish.

Another method of destructive fishing is poisoning the water in areas with large concentrations of fish. By pouring drops of sodium cyanide into the ocean, fisherman are able to sit back and watch as fish float from the bottom dead or stunned. According to Slow Food, around 65 tons of cyanide have been poured into the sea each year near the Philippines. This has been going on for years and has had an accumulated affect. While using poison to catch fish en-mass, has long term harm to the ecosystem and if stopped, many decades to recover. The practice is traditional among many cultures. It started as a plant-based subsistence which was better for the environment but since times have changed, people have turned to chemicals to speed up the process further. Fisherman made the switch from plant-based to harsh concentrated chemicals starting in the 1960s. The demand for aquariums started a new threat and is rising. After the aquarium trade started up and dwindled, the next demand was live reef fish in restaurants around China in places such as Hong Kong and Singapore. “Some 20,000 tonnes of live fish are eaten annually in the restaurants of Hong Kong - and for every live fish caught using cyanide, a square metre of their coral reef home is killed." says the WWF. If this practice continues, the coral reefs known today could be found in textbooks rather than the oceans.

This next method of destructive fishing is extremely harmful to the environment and can even be dangerous to the fisherman who practice it. Commonly called 'blast fishing' or 'dynamite fishing,' the use of explosives to catch fish has taken a toll on coral reefs as can be imagined and its coastal communities. Dynamite and other explosive combinations are set off in coral reefs, killing a multitude of multiple fish, while the fisherman wait for their bodies to surface before scooping them into the boat. Just one crater created from the detonation of an explosive can devastate up to 20 square meters of the sea floor. Coral is dying much faster than it is able to grow back. “With growth rates of 0.3 to 2 centimeters per year for massive corals, and up to 10 centimeters per year for branching corals, it can take up to 10,000 years for a coral reef to form a group of larvae.” (Barnes, 1987) Since it can take up to 10,000 years for a coral reef to recover completely, as long as the civilization of man. The destruction caused by explosive fishing is a such a huge deal to conservationists who have been petitioning to get bans placed on such practices with slow progress.

The last form of destructive fishing is ghost fishing. Ghost fishing is the least intentional of the devastating methods of fishing harming coral reefs and marine life worldwide. It often occurs when nets and other fishing gear are discarded into the ocean after breaking or having been worn down over years of use. What makes ghost fishing an issue for the coral reefs and other marine life is that once nets have settled to the seafloor, they continue to trap fish. Once the fish have been caught, they die from exhaustion when trying to escape or suffocate in attempt to reach the surface to breathe. In a survey concerning waste on the bottom of the North Sea, an estimated quarter of all trash is fishing nets and abandoned gear. Turtle and dolphin graveyards have started to become common among the nets hanging off the Cape Wessell Cliffs in Northern Australia too. With the ever increasing amount of fishing activity due to rising demand, the waste left behind has started to kill at alarming rates. Since many of the nets and lines are made of long-lasting synthetic fiber, most do not break down over time. Therefore, the only way to stop ghost fishing is to start clean up programs, fishing gear waste collection, and or net inspections, to decrease the amount of discarded fishing line in the waters.

Destructive forms of fishing are an obvious threat to marine life, coral reef ecosystems and oceans all over the world. Immediate action needs to be taken to curb this destruction through informing, legislating and punishing the culprits.