'I believe
trawling inquiries have created an issue which is right up there with the cot death cases.'
A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences found that over the past decade, more than 231,000 square miles of seafloor off the US coast--roughly the size of California--has been directly affected by bottom
trawling. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that in Alaskan waters alone, more than a million pounds of corals and sponges are removed from the seafloar every year by commercial fishing, roughly 90 percent by bottom trawlers.
In June 2003, the National Trust met with Environment Minister Angela Smith to raise its continued concerns regarding the decline in Horse Mussels and the continuation of
trawling.
It says it believes
trawling, in general, has produced a ``new genre of miscarriage of justice'', with cases built on unreliable evidence and leading to unsafe convictions.
Trawling nets and gear weighing several tonnes are dragged along the ocean bottom, dislodging rocks, sediments, plants and animals that lie in their path.
It is the wide extent of
trawling that concerns many scientists and other people.
Nowadays, every kind of seabed - silt, sand, clay, gravel, cobble, boulder, rock reef, worm reef, mussel bed, seagrass flat, sponge bottom, or coral reef - is vulnerable to
trawling. For fishing rough terrain or areas with coral heads, trawlers have since the mid-1980s employed "rockhopper" nets equipped with heavy wheels that roll over obstructions.
They will be referred to the Lower Criminal Court to face charges of
trawling and illegal fishing.
Usually, an indicator of the fishing effort used in trawl fisheries corresponds to the time and duration of the
trawling (Kotwicki et al, 2001); however, this effort unit is not related to the technological features of the trawl that produces the fishing mortality.
Labour MP Barry Sheerman claimed those who worked with children were having their lives ruined as detectives working on the Operation Pallial inquiry were
trawling for information from a wide net of former residents in the homes.
MEPs added a review clause asking the Commission to assess after four years the impact on vulnerable deep-sea species and marine ecosystems of bottom trawls and gillnets used for deep-sea fishing, with the possibility of proposing a general phase-out of bottom
trawling thereafter.
These experimental groundlines were not assumed to be practical alternatives for shrimp
trawling, but rather were tested to see what level of disturbance reduction was possible through simple changes in materials and construction.