It's estimated that we lose 100 SPECIES EVERY DAY, that half of all species are going to be extinct within 100 years, and we're just beginning to phase out plastic bags!?! Seriously, I feel like we should all be wearing prescription helmets at this point and consider letting another species dominate this planet for a while.
I think the best description I've heard of long line fishing (and I might have said it before) is that it would be equivalent of putting a string of traps in the woods that was miles and miles long to catch bears. You would catch some bears but you would also catch fox, wolves, rabbits, moose, deer, dogs, and the occasional human. Incredible wasteful and ridiculous right?
Welcome to longline fishing!
Longlining is a technique where hooks are placed on a very long line with bait, spread over miles of ocean. The Wake Project Society describes it as:
The practice of long lining includes laying a line of baited hooks ranging in length from 150m to 100km.1 It is a massively indiscriminate way of fishing, catching not just the targeted fish but all manner of sea creatures
You can find a really great illustration of how it works on their website here.
Despite recent improvements in regulation and sustainability, the technique is wasteful and have been proven to be extremely harmful to particular species like sharks and Albetross. According to the Human Society over two billion hooks are put in the water with long lines each year.
Major countries that still use long lining include the US, China, Japan, and the European Union, although there are many more smaller nations using the technique.
Here's a video on long line fishing with fun music while fish are caught on hooks and try desperately to get away!:
Despite what I have claimed in the past, I now believe the biggest threat to the environment right now is today's common fishing practices.
Technologies developed in the past 30 years are far too destructive, wasteful, and unselective.
Because I don't want to overwhelm you my dear readers (all two of you), I've broken this up into an exciting 3 part series.
Today's subject is bottom trawling, a fishing technique which involves dragging a fishing net across the sea floor. To be able to give you an idea of just how ridiculous this common technique is, the equivalent would be to bulldoze an entire rainforest in the search for meat. Yes, you would catch some deer, moose, and bear... but you would have entire forests, swamps, and rivers decimated in the process.
Greenpeace has a really great video demonstrating how bottom trawling works:
Greenpeace International describes bottom trawling on their website:
"Bottom trawling involves dragging huge, heavy nets along the sea floor. Large metal plates and rubber wheels attached to these nets move along the bottom and crush nearly everything in their path. All evidence indicates that deep water life forms are very slow to recover from such damage, taking decades to hundreds of years - if they recover at all."
In addition to being disastrous to the ecosystems and fish populations, the Gulf Coast Preservation Society estimates that up to 50% of what is caught from bycatch is thrown back into the waters. This has resulted in the decline of many species who end up caught in fishing nets....for example up to 90% of sharks are caught as bycatch from tuna nets.
The good news is that some countries are moving towards banning bottom trawling, the bad news is that countries like Spain, Russia, and Iceland continue to bottom trawl. And those are the countries we know about. The Wake Project Society explains why its hard to know who's really doing what in international waters here.
The reasons for these fishing techniques and lack of regulation aren't definite, some believe that it's simply ignorance, others use the 'economic' argument (the fishing industry employees millions of people), and some believe that many fishing companies owe their governments millions of dollars for their boats and equipment that they have no choice but to pillage the seas.
But that's not really the point, because the result is going to be the same and none of those reasons hold any water (pun intended).
As mentioned before, the real crisis with our oceans is that we really don't know that much about them. We obtain up to 70% of our oxygen supply from our oceans and it's really anyone's guess as to what will happen if we completely empty our waters (which is slated to happen soon). Well, it isn't really anyone's guess... there are differing theories but ultimately no consensus.
It's surprising to me how many 'vegetarians' I meet still eat fish. It's a very interesting physcological question on what and who we extend our compassion to.
How come the morals and reasons that have convinced someone not to eat meat do not apply to fish? Is it because we are constantly told how good and essential fish is to our diet? Or is it because most fish are caught from the wild and so the factory farming issue doesn't apply?
Or is it because humans can't identify emotions or feelings from fish like we can from cows or pigs?
I usually contend that our moral compass as a society continues to grow but it starts from large animals down to the small (seriously... ask a mouse or a spider). I've heard the arguments as to why humans have a right to rule over and consume animals and when the arguments are defeated it is usually through examples of larger animals (many animals exhibit cognitive dissonance, empathy, grief). People can visably see a gorilla holding the body of their dead baby or an elephant funeral) but it's more difficult to visualize these traits in our marine life.
I'm not saying that all animals have the same level emotional intelligence or foresight but it's getting harder and hard to ignore the science that all animals feel pain in the same sense that we do.
You can find an interesting on how fish feel pain here.
