U.S. move signals hope for saving marine habitats

Seeking to protect deep-sea coral beds and other sensitive fish habitat, a U.S. federal fishing council banned bottom trawling this month over more than 370,000 square miles off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, the largest such action taken anywhere in the world.

In bottom trawling, fishing boats drag huge nets and steel plates along the ocean floor for miles in very deep water near mountains known as seamounts that rise from the sea floor, hunting species such as fluke, cod and mackerel. The nets catch everything in their path, digging out deep-sea corals and sponge forests that scientists think may be essential to the ecosystem.

“Bottom trawling is recognized as the most destructive fishing activity,” said Karen Sack, ocean-policy adviser for Greenpeace International. “When a bottom trawl comes across corals, the sea floor is just snagged and destroyed.”

Scientists long have known about corals and sponges in shallow tropical waters, but until recently, they did not know coral forests and sponge reefs are widespread in certain cold, deep-ocean habitats. Now they have discovered them off Japan, Tasmania, New Zealand, Alaska, British Columbia, California, Florida, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Mauritania.

Marine scientists think the deep seas support millions of species, most still undiscovered, constituting a reservoir of biodiversity comparable to tropical rain forests.

Reports from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea say such sensitive habitats need special protection, especially against the destruction caused by bottom trawls and similar fishing practices.

Video images of affected areas and new scientific evidence regarding the age and slow growth of corals indicate that ecosystems that are sometimes thousands of years old are being damaged beyond repair.

Environmentalists call the ban passed Feb. 10 by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) a historic victory for saving the world’s seas because it signals a shift in thinking about how to manage oceans and proposes a new approach to protecting the coral reefs, sometimes called “the rain forests of the sea.”

“It is a paradigm shift in how we treat the oceans and fisheries management,” said Phil Kline, senior fisheries adviser for Oceana, a Washington-based marine-conservation organization.

“Before, we would react to the consequences of our actions. This stops it,” he said. “We have to go out and have the quantifiable science of the effects of our actions before we use the areas that have been set aside.”

Susan Murray, associate director of Oceana’s Pacific office, said: “The ballgame is all about sustainability: How do we catch fish without destroying the very habitat and world that those fish depend on to survive?”

Typically, entire oceans are open to fishing except areas set aside to protect some species or to rebuild some fish or crab stocks. The NPFMC took the opposite approach: It recommended outlawing bottom trawling everywhere in the Aleutians, except on the roughly 25,000 square miles where boats fish today — the areas historically yielding the best catches.

“Prior to the action in Alaska, our fisheries were defined as: ‘You can fish everywhere except someplace that is closed’ — and the closed, protected areas were very small little postage-stamp kind of areas. Now you can fish in the open areas and everything else is closed,” Mr. Kline said.

Other areas where deep-sea corals live already have been closed to protect the unique marine habitats. In 1996, the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council prohibited fishing vessels from dropping anchors and grapples, or attaching chains there.

Some years ago, Norway discovered that more than half the deep-sea corals off its coast had been destroyed by bottom trawling, and immediately closed the area. In 1999, Oslo created Europe’s largest deep-sea coral-protected area and since has banned trawling in four additional reef areas.

Story Continues →