OCEAN fishermen are constantly on the lookout for new places to ply their trade, as they exhaust the old ones. Thus, in the 1970s, Europe’s trawlermen turned to the deep seabed of the north-east Atlantic to replace the shallow continental-shelf fisheries closer to home that they had stripped near-bare.
But those replacement grounds, too, are not what they were. A study published in 2009 suggested that in all but the deepest of their waters—those with a seabed closer than 1,500 metres to the surface—yields had dropped by 70% over 25 years. Even in the abyss below that depth, the fall was 20%. To try to stem this decline the European Union, which regulates fishing in much of the area, is proposing to limit the depth at which trawling can take place. This would, in effect, create a marine reservoir below that level, a form of protection additional to the system of species-specific quotas that already exists. The question is where the line below which trawl-gear is forbidden should be drawn. And, until now, there have been few scientific data to inform that decision.
This has just changed, however, with the timely publication, in...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1KtFC4d
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