dangerous for traditional side-hauled nets. Equipped with the latest technology – radar, sonar, fish finders, and echograms – Fairtry could track down schools of fish in any conditions. Once on board, the fish could be fed into automated filleting machines and a fish meal rendering factory and quickly chilled in giant freezers. Fairtry could fish around the clock for weeks on end before returning to its home port of Hull, in the UK, with a massive haul of fish.
Such was the chilling effectiveness of the Fairtry that it soon spawned imitators. By the 1970s, the Soviet Union had 400 factory trawlers, Japan 125, Spain 75, West Germany 50, and France and the UK 40, with dozens more operated by smaller countries. Between them, these boats scooped up vast quantities of hake in South Africa, krill in Antarctica, pollock off Alaska, and northern cod on the Georges Banks and the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
On the Grand Banks, the factory ships caught as much fish as had been caught in decades in earlier years, in just a few years, and before long this once unimaginably abundant fishing ground was entirely fished out. This setback has not stopped the factory ships. When fishing quotas or depletion of stocks limits catch in one fishing ground, they have the range to move on and hunt farther afield.
Tropical Waters
Fishing Methods
• Longline fishing: involves trailing a line many kilometres long with hundreds or even thousands of baited hooks. Surface lines catch tuna and swordfish. Demersal lines catch seabed fish such as halibut. It can also catch albatross and sea turtles that try to feed on the bait, but is less damaging overall than trawling can be. • Midwater (pelagic) trawling: involves towing a cone-shaped net either from a single
boat or between two boats (pair-trawling) fairly high in the water to catch pelagic fish such as anchovies, shrimp, tuna, and mackerel. The main problems are by-catch. • Bottom trawling: involves dragging a net along the seabed (benthic trawling) or
just above (demersal trawling) to catch groundfish, such as sole, flounder, and halibut, or demersal fish such as cod, rockfish, squid, and shrimp. It can have a very damaging effect on seabed communities, especially slow-growing coldwater corals such as Lophelia pertusa, which can take hundreds of years to recover.
• Seine fishing: uses a weighted seine net that hangs from floats. Purse seines draw the bottom of the net together like a purse to catch sardines, mackerel, herring, and anchovies, as well as some kinds of tuna.
g These unwanted dead starfish, dumped from fishing boats on a quay at Hokkaido, Japan, may provide a great meal for the slaty-backed gulls, but marine life is being devastated by this waste.
f This great white shark, caught inadvertently in nets off New Zealand, makes up just a small part of the million tons of unwanted ‘by-catch’ caught up and dumped back in the sea to die every year by the global fishing industry.
h A sea turtle, lying lifeless on the deck amid the catch of fish, is a stark reminder of the threat posed by fishing even to non-targeted species. But the right fishing gear, such as turtle excluder devices, can help decrease by-catch.
the biG fiShout
The world’s biggest factory trawler is the 144-m (472-ft) long, 7,700-ton (7,000-tonne) monster once known as the Atlantic Dawn and now called the Annelies Ilena. This giant trawler can haul on board hundreds of tonnes of fish an hour, and on a single trip can net enough fish to feed the entire population of Tokyo for a day. When it was first launched, it became the focus of controversy because the European Union would not grant it a licence to fish in European waters. So instead, the boat fished off Mauretania in Africa, where it was said to be catching the same amount of fish as 7,000 traditional fishermen. Today, it is trawling in the South Pacific.
Factory trawling arouses controversy not just because of the vast quantity of fish that it catches, but because of its indiscriminate nature. To get the large numbers of cod they needed to fill their nets, for instance, factory trawlers would home in on the fish as they gathered to spawn, sweeping them away before they could produce their offspring.
by-catch
Another problem is ‘by-catch’. Colin Woodard in his salutary book Ocean’s End describes the practice of ‘high-grading’ on the cod fishing trawlers in the 1980s, which meant catching everything in the net and then discarding the unwanted. ‘Crabs, flounder, redfish, starfish, juvenile cod, sharks, and a hundred other unwanted creatures – the so-called by-catch – would be sent overboard through special discard chutes; for every 3 tons of fish that were processed, another ton or more of other creatures were killed in this manner.’
The waste is just as high today. Each year, nearly 27 million tonnes (30 million tons) of by-catch is dumped in the sea – a quarter of the entire global catch. Shrimp trawlers are the worst, killing up to 20 kg (44 lb) of unwanted fish for every 1 kg (2.2 lb) of shrimp caught. Shrimp fisheries take just 2 percent of the world fish catch but a third of all its by-catch, and shrimp trawlers are the main killers of adult endangered sea turtles, hauled up indiscriminately with the shrimp on which they feed. In theory, they should be thrown back, but they rarely survive. Dolphins and whales are also victims of industrial fishing vessels. If they are spotted in the nets, they should be released, but they usually drown long before they can be put back.
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f Adelie penguins live farther south than any other birds and have to cope with very cold conditions. They are helped by short, stocky bodies and short, densely packed feathers as well as an underlying layer of insulating fat.