Stop The Slaughter of Bottom Trawling

How do you like to prepare your slimehead? That’s not a nonsense question - there really is a popular food known as slimehead, though you’ve probably heard it under a different name. It’s a fish that fine restaurants prefer to call orange roughy. The orange roughy is a long-lived deep sea fish that is being pulled out of the oceans at a rate that threatens it with extinction because, well, orange roughy does sound delicious, doesn’t it?

As long as we’re playing around with food names here, how about a filet of slaughtered coral? That’s what you’re eating when you’re eating slimehead, or orange roughy, or whatever you want to call it.

People think about corals as shallow-water animals, but there are deep water corals as well, living down far below where the light could ever reach. These corals grow slowly, and can be quite spectacular, though rarely seen.

Slimehead, and other deep sea fish are harvested through bottom-trawling, a terribly destructive form of fishing in which a heavy net is dragged along the ocean bed, ripping up everything in its path. Deep sea corals, and other sea-bottom animals, come up along with the fish.

People are fond of saying that the Great Wall of China is the only sign of humankind that can be seen from outer space. If only that were true. The photograph you see above was taken from outer space, and shows human-made scars on the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico. They were made by bottom trawlers. To get an idea of the scale of their destruction, look at that line in the lower right hand corner of the photograph. It’s ten kilometers long.

That photograph comes to us from the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. Another photograph that shows the price of orange roughy and other deep water seafood, seen here to the left, comes from Deep Sea News.

The photograph shows a “bubblegum coral” hauled out of the sea by bottom trawlers working in the waters off of New Zealand. According to the Peter Etnoyer, who studies deep sea corals, these casualties of the trawlers were colonies “on the order of 100-200 years old”.

In 100 to 200 more years, will there be any deep water colonies of bubblegum coral left? Not if people keep on eating their orange roughy. People who know the true cost of deep water seafood and decide to keep buying it anyway are the true slimeheads.

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