Factory trawlers are vacuuming the oceans clean of sea life at an alarming pace. Thirteen of the 17 major global fisheries are depleted or in serious decline. The other four are “overexploited” or “fully exploited.”
Today’s commercial fishers use vast “factory” trawlers the size of football fields and advanced electronic equipment and satellite communications to track fish. (Large operations also use airplanes or helicopters!) Huge nets, sometimes miles long, stretch across the ocean, swallowing up everything and everyone, including turtles and terns.
One type of net is a purse seine, which is drawn up and closed like a duffle bag. Purse seining for yellowfin tuna has aroused public outrage in behalf of dolphins ensnared with the tuna swimming below them. But what about the tuna? While tuna may not have Flipper’s smile, they suffer, too. Underwater explosives, used to herd dolphins, cause terror and pain to the tuna as well, and the pressure waves from underwater detonation can burst a fish’s swimbladder.
Trawlers drag enormous nets through the water, forcing all fish in their path into the closed end. For hours, the trapped fish are squeezed and bounced, together with any netted rocks and ocean debris. “Prolonged tumbling and dragging in the net had caused the fish to rub against each other and file away their sharp scales,” author William Warner reported of a haul he observed.
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“Perhaps the time has come to formulate a moral code which would govern our relations with the great creatures of the sea as well as with those on dry land. That this will come to pass is [my] dear wish.”
—Jacques Cousteau
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“Their flanks, in fact, were scraped entirely raw.”
When hauled up from the deep, fish undergo excruciating decompression. Frequently, the intense internal pressure ruptures the swimbladder, pops out the eyes, and pushes the esophagus and stomach out through the mouth.
Smaller fish, such as flounder, are ordinarily dumped onto chopped ice: Most suffocate or are crushed to death by fish who follow. Larger fish, such as scrod and haddock, tumble onto the deck. Eyewitness William MacLeish described how the catch is sorted: The crew stabs the fish with short, spiked rods called pickers, “throwing cod here, haddock there, yellowtail there.” Next, the fish's throats and bellies are slit. Meanwhile, non-target fish (“bycatch”), who sometimes comprise most of the catch, are thrown overboard, often by pitchfork.
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| A torn trawler net is slowly strangling this seal. |
On any given day, fishers may set out some 40,000 miles of gillnets, driftnets on the Pacific high seas, and anchored nets in coastal waters.
Plastic, weighted gillnets hang like curtains, generally to a depth of 30 feet. Unable to see the netting, fish swim into it. Unless they are smaller than the mesh size, they get no further than poking their heads through. When they try to back out, the netting catches them by their gills or fins. Many of the fish suffocate; others struggle so desperately in the sharp mesh that they bleed to death.
Because gillnets are left unmonitored, trapped fish can suffer for days. Some commercial fishers still harpoon large, valuable fish (such as swordfish, tuna, and sharks) or hook them individually. Large fish are caught by “long-lining,” in which a ship unreels as much as 30 miles of line bristling with hundreds of thousands of baited hooks.
And that’s not all! In the process of slaughtering billions of sea animals, trawlers also dump into the oceans:
• 450,000 plastic containers,
• 52 million pounds of plastic packing material, and
• 298 million pounds of plastic fishing net.
