Latest Bottom trawling Stories

By EXCLUSIVE Philip Bowern Pressure from the Devon Wildlife Trust, which succeeded in banning scallopers and other bottom trawlers from an area of Lyme Bay, could force the displaced fishermen to move into even more sensitive marine areas off Devon and Dorset. That warning was made to Paul Gompertz of the Devon Wildlife Trust as long ago as December last year in letters seen by the Western Morning News. Yet the trust pressed ahead with its calls for a ban on bottom trawling in a large area...

North Carolina's most spectacular and unspoiled natural habitat doesn't get many visitors. It's so remote that most people would never notice if harm came to it. That's exactly why it deserves strong protection before it's too late. The Lophelia banks lie in deep North Carolina coastal waters, part of a chain of coral formations stretching from New England to the Florida keys. Only scientists in specially designed submersibles have seen them, but their findings portray an immensely rich...

By Richard Gaines, Gloucester Daily Times, Mass. Jun. 25--Last of 3 parts A charter officer of the nonprofit corporation created to support a more aggressive approach to federal management of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary has resigned in the face of what she describes as a bias against commercial fishing. "I felt like the group had an attitude that was anti-fishing," Dale Brown told the Times yesterday Brown said she resigned a month ago from Stellwagen Alive: Friends of...

Bottom trawling, an industrial fishing method that drags large, heavy nets across the seafloor stirs up huge, billowing plumes of sediment on shallow seafloors that can be seen from space.As a result of scientific studies showing that bottom trawling kills vast numbers of corals, sponges, fishes and other animals, bottom trawling has been banned in a growing number of places in recent years. Now satellite images show that spreading clouds of mud remain suspended in the sea long after the...

WASHINGTON - President Bush called for a halt to destructive fishing on the high seas Tuesday and said the United States will work to eliminate or better regulate practices such as bottom trawling that devastate fish populations and the ocean floor.Bush directed the State and Commerce departments to promote "sustainable" fisheries and to oppose any fishing practices that destroy the long-term natural productivity of fish stocks or habitats such as seamounts, corals and sponge fields...

By Yereth RosenANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Newly discovered gardens of colorful corals, which bloom about 1,000 feet (305 meters) underwater off Alaska's Aleutian Islands and in the Gulf of Alaska, will get special protection starting Friday.A new rule bars bottom trawling, the fishing technique that uses nets to drag the ocean floor, in an area off Alaska equivalent in size to Texas and Colorado combined.It is the largest protected area in U.S. waters and one of the biggest in the world,...

GENEVA -- Governments worldwide have failed to prevent overfishing in the oceans, where a proliferation of bottom-trawling threatens to wipe out deep sea species, conservation groups WWF and Traffic said on Friday.The environmentalists said the existing system of regional fisheries regulation, meant to control the depletion of ocean life, had responded slowly to new threats and done little to enforce fishing quotas or rebuild vulnerable stocks.Their report, released ahead of a New York...

OSLO (Reuters) - The United Nations should protect the world's oceans from deep sea fishing and pollution in the same way as environmentally sensitive land, the lobby group Greenpeace said on Tuesday.A Greenpeace report, published to coincide with a U.N. meeting in Brazil on biodiversity, said that 40 percent of the world's oceans should be placed in nature reserves.Just 0.6 percent of the oceans are protected reserves at present, compared with 12 percent of the world's land, according to...

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - With tracts of the ocean as little known as Mars, discoveries of a stunning richness of life in the depths are spurring calls for more protection from trawlers, oil drillers and prospectors. Only about 0.5 percent of the oceans are in protected areas, compared to about 12 percent of the earth's land surface set aside in parks for creatures ranging from lions in South Africa to polar bears in Alaska. A United Nations meeting...

By Alister Doyle, Environment CorrespondentOSLO -- With tracts of the ocean as little known as Mars, discoveries of a stunning richness of life in the depths are spurring calls for more protection from trawlers, oil drillers and prospectors.Only about 0.5 percent of the oceans are in protected areas, compared to about 12 percent of the earth's land surface set aside in parks for creatures ranging from lions in South Africa to polar bears in Alaska.A United Nations meeting of the Convention on...