Fishing: What Science Tells Us About the Impact of Trawling on the Seabed

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Maruf Hassan
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Fishing: What Science Tells Us About the Impact of Trawling on the Seabed

Post by Maruf Hassan »

Steadily increasing since the 1960s, global seafood consumption has gone from 9 kilos in those years to more than 20 kilos per person on average in 2018 – i.e. 17% of animal protein consumed. Around half comes from wild marine resource catches , illustrating the importance of fisheries in global and European diets. Like any human activity, the extraction of living marine resources is accompanied by more or less marked effects on these resources, but also by collateral effects on non-targeted species and habitats. Thus, among the many human activities having pronounced impacts on marine ecosystems , fishing – and especially “bottom trawling” – currently represents one of the most widespread and intense pressures on the seabed of continental shelves, in particular Europeans. Recent awareness of the erosion of biodiversity resulting from most human activities has extended to the marine environment. And the acceptability of certain fishing practices, the effects of which would prove to be irreversible, is now the subject of debate.

Fixed or trolling fishing methods Fishing includes a wide variety of techniques depending on the species targeted or the areas exploited. Among these techniques, a distinction is made between “fixed gear”, deploying static gear – longlines, traps, nets – and “trailing gear”, using gear towed in the water column or on the bottom – trawls . These trailing arts targeting species living on or near the seabed must remain in constant contact with the bottom, as shown in the figure below. These fishing gear are therefore equipped with a phone number list ballast and spacer system (panels, pole) and a part that scrapes the ground (bead, scraper, chains, teeth) lifting or digging up the targeted species. This system is completed by a net or a grid to bring in the catches; it is usually towed by the ship via steel cables.

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The parts of the gear most damaging to the seabed are, for example, the scrapers which penetrate several centimeters into the sediments or the panels of trawls, sometimes weighing several tons, acting on a small but relatively deep surface (up to several dozen centimeters on certain soft sediments). The abraded surfaces depend on the size of the gear and the duration of the fishing; on a fishing action, they can thus reach several hundreds of thousands of m 2 . Trawling, this thousand-year-old technique Trawling is an ancient fishing method: the ancestor of the trawl can be considered as far back as Roman antiquity , when weighted nets were already dragged on the bottom. We can precisely date the origin of the first beam trawls to 1376, as evidenced by a complaint lodged with King Edward III already demanding at the time the prohibition of this “new and destructive” method of fishing . Following this complaint, also motivated by competition between fishing activities at the time, trawling was banned from the 3-mile zone (approximately 6 km) and pushed further offshore.
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