I will be the first to admit I love me some Cod and Chips( Steak fries to the Americans), esspecially being on the NorthEast coast of England! But there is a devastation going on to our waters today that will take a very very long time to right, if ever it can be made right, and this is what I am posting about today!
Trawling
Trawlers, some the size of football fields, work non-stop across the oceans' fishing grounds, backwards and forwards in a never-ending process which scoops up huge quantities of fish and destroys the sea bed and the creatures that live there. Nets like huge tapering bags are used, and the mouth of the bag can be 224 ft. wide! It is kept open by huge, metal-bound trawl (otter) boards that can weigh tons. They are dragged across the ocean floor and crush and grind to destruction anything in their path.

A variant is the beam trawl, where a long metal beam is fixed to the underside of the net's opening. Flotation devices keep the mouth of the net open and dangling from the beam are 'tickler' chains which drag along the bottom, forcing almost every creature from its hiding place into the mouth of the net.

Between 60 and 80 million tons of fish are caught from the seas of the world each year by trawling. The total for all methods is about 100 million tons. Fish that are too small, non-target species or species with no commercial value are discarded. This can include almost every creature from the sea or sea bed - sea urchins, brittle stars, crabs, dolphins, seals and sea-birds.

As shrimp nets are dragged through the water, they catch every living creature in their path - trapping both shrimp and unwanted fish and sea turtles. Sea turtles caught in shrimp nets are held under water until they drown. Thousands of endangered sea turtles are killed in this way every year.

The ecological balance of the oceans is disturbed when the catch rate exceeds the natural reproduction rate. This is overfishing. All 17 of the world's major fisheries have either reached or exceeded their limits. The North Sea is cleared of a quarter of it's fish every year.

Drift Netting
Drift nets hang like curtains from the surface of the sea. Constructed from thin but strong monofilament nylon, they are virtually invisible to all sea life. They can be up to an incredible 30 miles long. The target fish are often tuna but as dolphins tend to congregate where tuna swim, they too die in large numbers. Rays, sharks, sea birds and small whales all become entangled in these ghostly nets.

It is not uncommon for nets to become detached in rough weather and float away to kill large numbers of animals and birds. When weighed down with dead bodies they sink to the bottom but once the carcasses have rotted, they float back to the surface and continue their destruction. Thousands of dolphins, porpoises, small whales, sea lions and walruses are killed by drift nets each year.

After years of campaigning, drift nets were banned by the EU from 1 January 2002 in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Sadly, the Baltic Sea was exempted after lobbying by Demmark, Sweden and Finland who continue to use this destructive fishing technique with their 350 vessels.

Purse Seine Netting
A purse seine net is suspended from the surface, the bottom of it many fathoms below the surface. The boat pays out the net in a complete circle so the effect is like that of a tube of netting hanging down, surrounding the target shoal of fish. A kind of drawstring at the bottom of the net is pulled tight so the net represents a purse with an open top but a closed bottom. The top is then also closed and the net hauled inboard. Again, tuna are the main target but again, dolphins also get trapped and drown.

Wildlife
Many birds, including razor-bills, cormorants, and puffins, feed mainly on sand eels, sprats and small herrings, all of which are heavily exploited by fishermen. In 1994, overfishing in the North Sea was believed to have caused about 100,000 birds to starve and the problem seems to be worsening.

Commercial fishermen often blame the low numbers of fish on local wildlife and demand ‘culling’ to solve the problem. As a result, seals have been killed in their thousands - 51,000 in Russia and 250,000 in Canada in 1996 and there are similar demands being made in Britain. In February 1999, a proposal was presented to the US Congress by the National Marine Fisheries Service to allow fishermen and ‘resource’ managers to shoot Pacific harbour seals and Californian sea lions along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington to protect the dwindling stocks of salmon and steelhead and to reduce competition for fish between these pinnipeds and humans.

Before and After A Trawler

Here is a video of the bottom trawlers:
http://archive.greenpeace.org/oceans/video/trawling_win.wmv

Here is the same video in Quicktime format
http://archive.greenpeace.org/oceans/video/trawling_QT.mov

Here is a small presentation about the problem at hand
mms://a876.v90022.c9002.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/876/9002/7d711c321c/www.greenpeace.org/download/windowsmedia/interna tional/photosvideos/videos/nafo-bottom-trawling/Bottom_Trawling_in_the_NAFO_area.wmv

here is the same clip in Quicktime
http://www.greenpeace.org/download/quicktime/international/photosvideos/videos/nafo-bottom-trawling/Bottom_Trawling_ in_the_NAFO_area.mov


For more articles and information on the destruction of our seas, check out this GreenPeace link
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/save-our-seas-2/save-deep-sea-life

A final few facts
Wasteful fishing is not unique to the live fish trade. The global industrial fishing fleet has many times the capacity needed to extract marine wildlife sustainably. The unsustainable exploitation of fish and other marine wildlife is pushing ocean ecosystems to the brink of collapse.

Worldwide, some 35,000 legal, high-tech fishing vessels ply the seas.

In the past 50 years, the world’s fish catch grew more than fourfold—from roughly 20 million tons to 90 million tons.

During the same period, the variety of fish species dropped by as much as 50 percent because of overfishing, habitat destruction, and climate change.

Ninety percent of large predator fish species such as cod, shark, and bluefin tuna have disappeared.

Industrial fishing generates about 25 million tons of unwanted by-catch—fish and marine mammals that are dumped overboard, dead or dying.

For every pound of wild-caught shrimp, at least 10 pounds of other sea life, including many fish otherwise sought as edible seafood, are also caught and discarded.

In the 1960s, the average swordfish hooked and landed weighed 266 pounds. Today, massive fishing pressure has reduced the average size to 90 pounds.

Long-line vessels annually set up to 10 billion baited hooks on lines as long as 60 miles. Millions of sharks, hundreds of thousands of sea birds and marine mammals, and numerous endangered sea turtles and other creatures die each year on those hooks.

Some 1,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises die daily in trawl nets. Heavy bottom trawlers destroy delicate ocean floor habitat, much like bulldozers flattening a forest.