Sea’s treasures may no longer be with us from here to eternity

Magnus Linklater, Times Online 15 Feb 08;

Six years ago I wrote an article for The Times about the destruction of the cold-water corals off the Atlantic Shelf, a virtually unexplored deep-sea wilderness 200 miles from Britain’s western coastline.

I described an ecological tragedy as far-reaching for the oceans as the impact of pesticides on the land environment revealed more than 40 years ago in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Unfortunately, unlike Carson’s book, which had the effect of alerting the world to the dangers of pollution, my article had no such benefit.

Today, fleets of ocean trawlers, most of them Japanese, French and Spanish, scraping the floor of the deepest ocean basins with their heavily weighted nets, have almost completed the despoliation of this wonderful and once diverse marine paradise.

A combination of intensive fishing, sophisticated technology and some of the most destructive trawling nets devised by Man has been devastating fish stocks, ruining the rarest of cold-water coral reefs on the ocean floor and wiping out species so rare that some have not yet been properly identified.

One scientist described it recently as “one of the great extinction spasms of geological history”. Another, whom I interviewed at the time, said: “It is an unparalleled combination of greed and ignorance . . . By the time something is finally done we may well have lost for ever a major part of our maritime heritage.”

Now, despite meetings, conferences and UN resolutions, virtually nothing has been achieved. A few “boxes” of ocean have been declared off-limits, but virtually no control is exercised over them. Greenpeace, which has been monitoring the activity of deep-sea trawlers, confirmed that they were still operating freely.

The area at risk runs from the Rockall Trough, 200 miles out from the Hebrides, to the Porcupine Bank, west of Ireland. It covers two million square miles (five million square kilometres). Survey expeditions in the 19th century suggested that no animal life could exist there because it was more than 300 fathoms (550m) deep.

More recently, however, an incredible range of fish life has been identified, including blue ling, roundnose grenadier, black scabbardfish, and the most ruthlessly exploited orange roughy.

French fleets, using global positioning technology, and nets weighed down with concrete-filled tractor wheels, have been landing up to 5,000 tonnes of orange roughy a year, along with about 7,000 tonnes of blue ling, 3,500 tonnes of black scabbardfish, 10,000 tonnes of roundnose grenadier and 3,500 tonnes of shark. With no enforceable quotas, the effect has been devastating. Some experts at the Scottish Association for Marine Science estimated that in less than a decade all these species have been declared effectively in danger of extinction.

At the same time, trawl nets have been scraping up fish known as “discard species” – hauled to the surface, then dumped back into the sea. None survives. At a depth of 1,000m it is estimated that between 30 and 50 per cent of the catch is thrown back. Because these deep-water fish take many years to mature there is little chance of stocks being renewed in the foreseeable future. A whole generation of breeding stock is being effectively eliminated.

Even more devastating has been the destruction of cold-water coral reefs that may be every bit as rich – and as fragile – as South Sea coral, the decline of which has become such an urgent conservation issue. Delicate stalked glass sponges, myriad small fish and crustaceans, hermit crabs, tiny eels and anemone-like creatures have been found in the muddy depths.

The truth is that scientists have only a hazy idea of the extent of the coral and no true analysis of the biomass that exists at these depths. They fear, however, that large areas have been destroyed, and with them a food chain that stretches up to the surface of the ocean.

If Carson were alive today, she would be outraged. In The Sea Around Us, she wrote that it contained the very foundations of biology. “To stand at the edge of the sea,” she wrote, “is to have knowledge of things that are as eternal as any earthly life can be.” Eternity, sadly, is one thing that can no longer be claimed for it.