Sea monsters

Bottom trawlers have a disastrous effect on ocean ecosystems. They should be outlawed everywhere

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Every day, thousands of bottom trawlers scour the seabed off the coasts of the UK, Africa and Asia and across the Mediterranean.

They drag heavy beams and weighted nets across kelp forests that were home to countless species and corals that can take centuries to grow. The damage they do to fish stocks and ocean ecosystems is indiscriminate. Their waste in discarded “bycatch” is unconscionable.

Bottom trawling is like bulldozing virgin rainforest, and every year the global fleet scrapes bare an area the size of the Amazon basin. A lot of people know this because the comparison features in Ocean, the new film by David Attenborough. It’s a heartbreaking piece of work for its imagery of life and death, and the sense it leaves of human senselessness.

Herring is almost gone from British waters, where bottom trawlers operate even in 90% of so-called marine protected areas. At this rate mackerel will be next, and then the common dab. A million of these flatfish a year are thrown overboard, dead.