February 26, 2002
Environment

After decades of severe overfishing, new deep-sea trawling techniques threaten to wipe out the world's last wilderness and we may be too late to stop it

Forty years ago an article appeared in The New Yorker magazine which was to change the face of conservation for ever. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring revealed the deadly impact of pesticides on the environment and gave warning that if nothing was done to control them, the whole balance of nature would be thrown out. Within months of it appearing, in June 1962, 40 US Bills had been introduced to control the use of DDT and other pesticides. Part of her article was written into the Congressional record.

The book that followed has since been described as the most influential document of the 20th century.

Rachel Carson’s real love, however, was the ocean. She made it the subject of her first book, The Sea Around Us, and she believed that it contained the very foundations of biology. “To stand at the edge of the sea,” she wrote, “is to have knowledge of things that are as eternal as any earthly life can be.”

That eternity is now being rendered suddenly and brutally finite. Out along the Atlantic Shelf, the richest, most diverse, but also most fragile underwater ecology in the world is being torn apart systematically. Within the past ten years a combination of intensive fishing, sophisticated technology and some of the most destructive trawling nets ever devised by man has been devastating fish stocks, ruining the ocean floor and wiping out species so rare that some of them have not yet been properly identified.

“It is,” says one scientist, “an unparalleled combination of greed and ignorance. So great is the damage, and so slow have we been to react, that by the time something is finally done we may well have lost for ever a major part of our maritime heritage.”

Rachel Carson, had she been alive today, might have been moved to write another book, and to call it The Silent Ocean. The awful truth, however, is that for mile upon mile of our deep-sea environment, it would have been too late.

Far out beyond the western coastline of the United Kingdom, the Atlantic Shelf falls away into a basin so deep that it was once considered beyond the reach of man. The Rockall Trough stretches from the far northwest, 200 miles out from the Hebrides, down as far as the Porcupine Bank, west of Ireland. It is some two million square miles in dimension. Early survey expeditions in the first half of the 19th century suggested that no animal life could exist there because it was more than 300 fathoms (550 metres) deep.

But then British Navy vessels such as the Lightning and the Porcupine, both wooden paddle ships, began investigating the deep waters, and brought back evidence that there was sea life as deep as 900 metres to the southeast of the Faroe Islands. Later they succeeded in recovering living material from depths of more than 4,000 metres. Further expeditions, mounted by the Irish, confirmed that a diversity of rare deep-sea marine life was to be found there.

So long as the trawler fleets of Europe had plentiful supplies of haddock and cod to occupy them in the shallower waters of the North Sea, commercial exploration of these deep and mysterious caverns of the Atlantic remained strictly limited. But as stocks of traditional fish began to dwindle, interest was renewed and in the 1970s a race began between researchers anxious to find out more about the ecology of the area, such as the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), based in Oban on the west coast of Scotland, and the deep-sea fishermen who wanted to exploit it with their increasingly sophisticated equipment.

Fishery surveys by the UK and Ireland in the 1970s and early 1980s identified fish species with the potential for exploitation, but by then the trawlers were on to them. In 1989 they began to develop markets for a range of species for which there was a growing appetite — blue ling, roundnose grenadier, black scabbardfish, and the one that has led to the most ruthless exploitation, the orange roughy.

This last was already notorious, for its discovery in the South Pacific off the New Zealand and Australian coasts had led to gross overfishing, severe depletion and near extinction. In the early 1990s, French trawlers established that the fish was available in large numbers in the Rockall Trough at depths of between 1,200 and 1,700 metres. Because the orange roughy moves in large shoals it is, despite the depth at which it lives, relatively easy for modern trawlers, with their side scan sonars, to detect. Once the trawlers are among them with vast nets which trail up to 4,000ft down, and often measure 150ft across, there is no escape. Global positioning systems, which use satellites to establish location, mean that the boats can return to precisely the same position time after time until the stocks are fished out. From 1992, when the French began serious fishing, they were landing up to 5,000 tonnes a year, along with about 7,000 tonnes of blue ling, 3,500 tonnes of black scabbardfish, 10,000 tonnes of roundnose grenadier, and 3,500 tonnes of shark. With no regulations and no enforceable quotas, the effect was devastating. Shocked marine scientists have established that in less than a decade all these species have been declared “beyond biological limits” — effectively, in danger of extinction.

That, however, is not the worst of it. Trawl nets fitted with what are known as “rock-hoppers” and dragged over the seabed are now being widely used by European trawlers. They are more devastating to ocean life than anything yet devised. Rock-hoppers are the huge balls or rollers, usually of metal or solid rubber, which are attached in front of the net and are designed to allow the trawl to ride over obstructions and thus prevent damage to the net. In rolling over the sea floor, followed by the scraping action of the net and its wires, they destroy everything in their path. Fish that are of no interest to the trawlermen — known disparagingly as “discard species” — are hauled to the surface, then dumped back into the sea. None survive. The wastage is truly terrible. At a depth of 1,000 metres, it is estimated that between 30 and 50 per cent of the catch is thrown back.

At 1,500 metres even more may be rejected. Because these deep-water fish take many years to mature — some do not start breeding until they are more than 20 years old — there is little chance of stocks being renewed in the foreseeable future. A whole generation of breeding stock is being effectively eliminated. There is also a deadly by-product: swaths of discarded netting drop down through the sea and continue to kill fish on the ocean floor, acting as what is known in the trade as “ghost-netting”. Meanwhile, the dead fish fall into the depths, attracting hordes of scavengers. The trawler fleets enjoy a short-term benefit from these extra stocks, but by this time what has happened down there on the scarred and scraped ocean floor has become an ecological disaster. It is only in the past ten years that scientists have been able to come to any meaningful conclusions about the richness and diversity of the marine life in these deep waters. One of their most startling discoveries is that along the continental margins, where the coastal seas slope away into the depths, there are extensive cold-water coral reefs which may be every bit as rich — and as fragile — as South Sea coral, the decline of which has become such an urgent conservation issue.

At the headquarters of SAMS in Oban, they have been studying both the richness of the coral reefs and the seabed itself. They have counted almost 100 species in just a quarter of a square metre — about 18in square — of seabed brought up to the surface.

Delicate stalked glass sponges, myriad small fish and crustaceans, hermit crabs, tiny eels and anemone-like creatures have been found lurking in the muddy depths. The truth is that scientists have only a hazy idea of the extent of the coral and no true analysis of the so-called biomass that exists at these depths. They fear, however, that already large areas have been destroyed without their knowing, and with them a food chain that stretches up to the surface of the ocean.

The existence of some organisms can be proved only because their presence is given away by tiny tubes or the burrows they leave. Precisely because so little is known, there is no means of measuring the long-term effect of their destruction. All the scientists can say is that this unquantifiably large and incredibly precious natural treasure is being systematically raped. Deep-water cameras have recorded whole areas of smashed coral and gouged-up seabeds. They have even detected “clean” rocks which must have been dug out from beneath the ocean floor and have probably not been disturbed since the Ice Age. Irreplaceable fauna have simply been obliterated.

In Norway, where a film of this sea-bed destruction was shown on national television, viewers were so horrified at what they saw that they demanded immediate action. The Norwegian Government responded by banning all trawlers from the coral-bed areas. Britain, however, cannot act unilaterally. This is a matter that can be decided only in Brussels, and Brussels has no incentive to do anything. Last year the World Wildlife Federation issued an unprecedented warning about the Atlantic fisheries. It said that unless action was taken now, the area would go the same way as the Canadian cod fisheries, which collapsed ten years ago and have never recovered. It welcomed a decision by the Scottish Executive to provide up to £25 million to encourage the decommissioning of Scots trawlers. But far more important, it said, was the reform of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy.

Here, however, the omens are not good. Oddly, the environmental agency Greenpeace must bear some responsibility. When, in 1976, Greenpeace occupied the island of Rockall as a way of protesting against oil exploration in the Atlantic, Britain agreed to renounce its claim to a 200-mile fishery zone around Rockall. From that point on, European fleets, and particularly the French, felt able to exploit what were now international waters. Brussels has shown relatively little interest in the overfishing of the Atlantic. Instead it has poured billions of euros into harmful and unsustainable subsidies which positively encourage national fleets to go looking for fish.

“It makes no sense,” says Louise Heaps, WWF’s Marine Fisheries Policy Officer. “The EU currently subsidises its fishing fleet to the tune of £868 million a year, much of which is invested in expanding fishing capacity instead of recovery plans for many of our important fish stocks.”

“The prospect for a sustainable fishery is very dark,” says Dr John Gordon, senior research fellow at SAMS. “Unless these trawlers can be regulated, we are facing the virtual obliteration of an underwater ecology. At least in the Rockall Trough we know a lot about what is being destroyed.

“Out to the west, in international waters, we may never comprehend the damage that has been inflicted.”

His colleague, Professor John Gage, agrees. “Science has a lot of catching up to do,” he says, “but at this rate we are never going to succeed.”

Despite these warnings, if the EU’s track record is anything to go by, reaction will be slow. A meeting in 1993 recommended “a precautionary approach” in the development of new fisheries. The International Commission for the Exploration of the Seas also recommended “caution”.

Since then, various bodies, including the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission, have met to consider the situation, without any effect. Its meetings take place only twice a year, and it has injected no sense of urgency into the debate.

In July 2000 the EC issued a press statement stating that it was “concerned” about the state of deep-water fish, and adding that a system of Total Allowable Catches might be “a step in the right direction”.

But no effective management of the seas has yet been introduced.

In the meantime, no one, save for concerned scientists such as Professor Gage, has even begun to speak out about the wrecked coral reefs, the indelible scarring of the ocean bed, and the destruction of the hidden flora and fauna that lie there. Yet it is here that action is most urgently needed. Forty years ago, Rachel Carson sensed the potential risks of man’s exploitation.

“For all at last return to the sea — to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end,” she wrote.

Unless a major international campaign of the kind she once put together is mounted by every environmental agency in the world that cares about the state of this hidden ecology, to bring pressure to bear on those governments and agencies whose responsibility it is to save it, then future generations will indeed be left to contemplate a Silent Ocean.