- WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP)
-- Every year, the giant nets that trawler ships pull across the bottom
of the sea devastate an area of the global seabed twice the size of the
United States, scraping up everything from coral to sharks, Greenpeace
said Friday.
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- "Scientists consider deepsea trawling to be the
greatest threat to deepsea life," Greenpeace oceans campaigner Carmen
Gravatt said.
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- After spending more than three weeks tracking sea bed
trawlers in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, the environmentalist
group renewed its call for an immediate moratorium on the use of bottom
trawl nets, which are about the size of football fields.
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- "We're here ... to show the government that urgent
action is needed to protect the unique and fragile environment of the deep
sea," Gravatt said, adding that Greenpeace has "documented the
destruction caused by bottom trawlers."
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- Scientists estimate that up to 100 million species live
in the deep sea, many around undersea mountains, she said. But trawling
on the high seas is "totally unregulated" and species could be
disappearing "even before they were discovered," she added.
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- Gravatt screened video footage of bottom-dwelling creatures
like starfish, spiny sea-eggs, crabs, squid and black coral that she said
are inadvertently scraped up by the trawlers, then dumped - dead - back
into the ocean.
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- "We saw (and) identified 18 by-catch species ...
which live on the bottom" being tossed down trawler discard chutes,
Greenpeace marine biologist Kathrin Bolstad said.
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- Some nets had more deepsea sharks in them than orange
roughy, the fish they were intended to catch, she said.
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- Gravatt said black coral was being ripped from deep sea
reefs by trawl nets despite being protected as an endangered species by
CITES, the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
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- "More than half the world's coral reefs are in the
deepsea," Gravatt said.
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- Sea bed trawling is not illegal, and in some countries
is licensed and tightly controlled. CITES provides for the protection of
endangered species.
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- She said commercial fishermen have claimed "bottom
trawl nets don't touch the sea bottom."
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- New Zealand trawl fishing spokesman George Clement dismissed
the Greenpeace claims as "patently ... just more green lies."
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- "We do trawl on the sea floor and there are localized
impacts,'' Clement said, adding that it was something they had never denied.
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- But he said 65 per cent of New Zealand's sea area is
untouched by trawlers, and "the trawl footprint is just minuscule
compared to the size of the area out there (on the sea floor)."
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- Gravatt said a global moratorium on sea bed trawling
"would allow time to make a proper assessment of life on the sea floor
and to put in place measures to protect it."
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- But Clement said a moratorium would only "allow
the illegal operators to thrive."
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- © The Canadian Press, 2004
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- http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/040618/w061818.html
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