Deep sea fishing

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Angled scabbard fish in the market of Funchal

As a deep-sea fishing fishing is with trawling on the high seas beyond the continental shelf understood. The trawls are pulled across the ocean floor; According to the current state of the art, deep-sea fishing can be operated down to a depth of 2,000 m. This type of trawling represents a threat to deep-sea fish species, which do not achieve a high rate of reproduction under the living conditions of the deep sea .

history

With the development of floating fish factories that process and freeze the fresh catch immediately on board, deep-sea fishing took off rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s . Especially the countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR were involved in deep-sea fishing at the time. However, this participation soon declined when the Convention of the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) was recognized by more and more states around the world at the end of the 1970s and, with the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, the states of this group largely withdrew from deep-sea fishing in the late 1980s .

These states were replaced by other deep-sea fleets, which during the 1980s and 1990s initially fished along the continental shelf and on submarine plateaus within their 200 nautical miles wide EEZ, and later also beyond these limits. These included fishing fleets from New Zealand in the late 1970s and French fleets in the Northeast Atlantic in the 1980s .

Effects

The nets that the fishing industry uses to fish today go deeper than 1.5 kilometers and can fetch up to 60 tons of fish (often 80–90% bycatch ) from the depths of the oceans within 20 minutes . 40% of all fishing grounds are now in the deep sea, deeper than the continental shelf . Modern technologies are so effective that the potential of fish is no longer just harvested, but in the true sense of the word is degraded.

According to nature conservation organizations such as Greenpeace , the devastation caused by trawlers with their trawls is comparable to the clear cutting in the rainforests .

According to the nature conservation organizations, bottom trawling on the high seas irreversibly destroys unique underwater ecosystems . They therefore call on the UN General Assembly to speak out in favor of a moratorium on deep-sea fishing. Deep sea reefs , which took 5000 years to form, are quickly destroyed by deep sea fishing.

In 2002 the UN banned trawls.

In a new regulation on deep-sea fishing, the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission issued a ban on trawl fishing at depths below 800 meters in July 2016.

Endangered species

A study of Canadian scientists has shown that at least five types are of deep sea fishing at great risk and danger of extinction: the blue pike ( Antimora rostrata ), the Stumpfnasen- Dornrückenaal ( notacanthus chemnitzi ), the round nose grenadier ( Coryphaenoides rupestris ), the Rough Grenadier ( Macrourus berglax ) and the greenland ray ( Bathyraja spinicauda ). Deep-sea fish often take 12 to 30 years to become sexually mature and produce offspring, probably depending on the ecological conditions. This long ripening period, together with overfishing in recent years, is responsible for the sharp decline in populations.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ New regulations for EU deep-sea fishing on eu-koordination.de, from July 6, 2016.
  2. ↑ Jennifer A. Devine, Krista D. Baker and Richard L. Haedrich (2006): Fisheries: Deep-sea fishes qualify as endangered . In Nature , 439 : 29 doi : 10.1038 / 439029a