Bottom Trawling Conclusions

dwhatley;164052 said:
Link to a short summary of findings studying footprint impact on the sea floor in Practical Fish Keeping

I don't know why the world insists on allowing this practice if the .31% (notice that is POINT thirty-one percent .0031) catch figure is close to correct.

Hi, just took a quick stroll down link lane to the original source of the 0.31% figure and from my initial reading it looks like some context has definitely been lost along the way. 0.31% is the percentage of the global catch in marine capture fisheries taken by bottom fishing vessels ON THE HIGH SEAS (this is the bit missing from the news report).

High seas fisheries tend almost by definition to be very deepwater fisheries, many 200nm from the nearest coast (Depending on local political situations this can come down to as little as 12 nm). This tends to be rather deep water which is not conducive to most bottom fishing methods which primarily occur within countries EEZs.

So just of the top of my head it looks like the difference between the percentage of the world marine capture fisheries taken by bottom fishing methods and the percentage of the world marine capture fisheries taken specifically by bottom fishing methods on the high seas is likely to be significant.
 
Yeah, I'm guessing that Practical Fish Keeping is not a peer reviewed journal and from the looks of it that "article" was simply paraphrasing of the abstract from an actual journal article. It's good if magazines like this are trying to direct people to interesting studies being published, but they need to be careful that they don't oversimplify and misrepresent what those studies actually say. As two of their other articles featured are titled "'Mutant' crustaceans at Newquay aquarium" and "The world's most disgusting aquatic creatures" I wouldn't expect to read any real science from their writers.
 
Practical Fish Keeping is a UK hobbyist magazine, not a science journal (nor does it proport to be) but they do read and summarize (and are sure to reference) reports that may be of interest to the hobbyist. The number obviously struck me as odd and I should have done as Cairnos did and looked further into the report.
 
dwhatley;165321 said:
Practical Fish Keeping is a UK hobbyist magazine, not a science journal (nor does it proport to be) but they do read and summarize (and are sure to reference) reports that may be of interest to the hobbyist. The number obviously struck me as odd and I should have done as Cairnos did and looked further into the report.

To be fair to Practical Fish Keeping they certainly did give the reference and further they got this from an article on PLOs One that focused on north east atlantic fisheries, which in turn sourced it from an FAO Technical paper. The relevant reference to high seas fishing only occurs in the FOA paper on page 128 on the wrong side of an unfortunately placed subclause and by the time it hits the PLOs One article (Benn AR, Weaver PP, Billet DSM, van den Hove S, Murdock AP, et al. 2010 Human Activities on the Deep Seafloor in the North East Atlantic: An Assessment of Spatial Extent. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12730) it had already disappeared.

At some point if I get a chance I may try to track down some kind of more representative number.
 

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