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Commercial Fishing: How Fish Get From the High Seas to
Your Supermarket
Bottom Trawlers
Bottom trawlers target species such as orange roughy, cod, and haddock.
Enormous bag-shaped nets are pulled along the ocean floor, catching
every rock, piece of coral, and fish in their paths. Large metal plates
at each end of the net drag along the ground, keeping the net close
to the ocean floor while stirring up sediment and forcing all the animals
in the net’s path into the closed end. Bottom trawling literally
scrapes the ocean floor clean of life and is considered to be the underwater
equivalent of clear-cutting forests.
Bottom-trawling nets rip hundreds of tons of animals out of
the ocean, squeezing some of them so tightly against the sides
of the nets that their eyes bulge and burst out of their skulls.
For hours, trapped fish are dragged along the ocean floor
with netted rocks, coral, and ocean debris. The scales of
many fish are completely ground off. When hauled out of the
water, surviving fish undergo excruciating decompression.
The intense internal pressure ruptures their swimbladders,
pops out their eyes, and pushes their esophagi and stomachs
out through their mouths.
Fish who survive this terrifying journey are tossed onto ice
to slowly freeze to death or be crushed when piles of schoolmates
are thrown on top of them. On some ships, processing begins
immediately, so as they are suffocating or freezing to death,
fish are sliced in half, packaged, and placed into the ships’
frozen storage areas.
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Bottom Trawling
“Advances”
When first developed, bottom-trawling nets were limited
to parts of the ocean that had a soft sediment floor
because rocks and coral tore holes in the netting, allowing
fish to escape. Now, bottom trawlers have huge wheels
along the entire bottom edge of the net. The heavy metal
wheels roll along the ocean floor, crushing everything
in their path, but keep the nets just off the ocean
floor to keep them from being torn. This “advance”
has dramatically expanded the range of bottom trawlers,
killing fish and other animals who had been protected
by their rocky habitat. Consequently, bottom trawling
is one of the most environmentally damaging fishing
techniques. Click
here to learn more about the environmental devastation
caused by fishing. |
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Trawling
the Deep