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Amanda Vincent, a professor at the Institute of Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, in Canada, has witnessed the destruction of bottom trawling over three decades researching seahorses across the world.
“Consider your favorite forest or hillside and imagine helicopters dropping heavily weighted wires and clear cutting everything in their path, plowing into the soil, but also taking out every bee, butterfly, bird, bush and bear,” she says. “We wouldn’t allow that on land, not for a minute, but this is what’s happening in the ocean all day, every day.”
“It’s just devastating and it wreaks ecological havoc,” Vincent says. “It’s annihilation fishing, pure and simple, and it has to stop.”
“Most trawl boats only catch one or two seahorses per boat per night (as bycatch). It sounds like nothing,” she says, but continues “countries like Thailand or India export five million seahorses a year, (so) it tells you something about the scale of those bottom trawl operations, because that’s the main way they catch seahorses.”
Impact on the oceans
“It has made a tremendous impact on the world’s oceans,” says Juan Mayorga, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “For each kilogram of shrimp, you could get up to 25 kilograms of incidental catch … There’s no such thing as a selective bottom trawl.”
“The first meter of the sea floor stores twice as much carbon as all of the terrestrial soils combined.” says Mayorga. “So it’s a huge, huge, huge reservoir of carbon.”
Reducing the damage
Mayorga says the number of bottom trawling vessels has plateaued in recent years, partially due to fuel costs, and that some changes have been made the industry less destructive, such as modifying the gear to reduce bycatch and allow species like sea turtles to escape, but he adds that these measures have not been adopted widely.
Vincent has found “great hope” in global commitments to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 by implementing Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), where fishing is tightly regulated or banned. Project Seahorse has helped establish 35 MPAs across the Philippines, whose island archipelago is home to 10 of the 46 known species of seahorse.
But for Vincent there is always more work to do.
Although bottom trawling is currently the biggest threat to seahorses, Vincent says they are also increasingly at risk from habitat destruction and climate change. “They really are a harbinger of things to come when you look at the fate of seahorses right now.”
“The ocean is everything to us — 99% of the space on Earth where life is possible is in the ocean,” Vincent adds. “Essentially we’re using seahorses to help save the seas. If we get it right for these funky little fishes, we will have done a lot for the ocean.”