Andrew Darby, The Age 7 Nov 09;
THE Federal Government has pulled plans to publicise the discovery of massive illegal fishing nets in the Antarctic, with the ship that found them, Oceanic Viking, now under a different spotlight.
Bottom-set gill nets are posing a new fisheries threat in Australian regional waters, where the ''curtains of death'' are being laid by foreign fishers on the deep-sea floor. Nets totalling 130 kilometres were found in April on Banzare Bank in the Southern Ocean by Oceanic Viking on fisheries patrol, sources told The Age yesterday.
The nets' use is outlawed by the 25-nation Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, but rich pickings of Patagonian toothfish are leading illegal fishers to set them anyway.
Plans by the Australian Government to publicise the find to coincide with the commission's meeting in Hobart this week were put on hold with Oceanic Viking detained with Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Indonesia, and the Federal Opposition asking why it is not doing its fisheries job instead.
When Oceanic Viking found the nets, the converted cable-laying ship did not have the gear to pull them up. Instead, it called on a nearby licensed fishing vessel owned by the Perth-based Austral Fisheries, which recovered 29 tonnes of toothfish, a bycatch of skates, and about 10 kilometres of net. The rest was ripped up and sunk.
Glenn Sant, global marine program leader for the wildlife monitoring network, TRAFFIC, said the nets were devastating for the environment. He described the nets as ''invisible curtains of death'' for everything that swims into them.
