- Joined
- Jun 3, 2004
- Messages
- 486
That's a good point to raise in a letter....along with a number....or better yet, if it at all possible, pictures of what a coral reef looks like after one visit by a bottom trawler, 2 passes, 3 passes, etc. I think it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but getting those pictures might be unbelievably difficult. I have no idea of what might be involved, or it's cost.
Pictures do exist and there is some science out there to back them up. Off the top of my head - work by Koslow et al. off Tasmania ~2001, I have the paper (at uni), it has photos of trawled and untrawled seamounts, which includes photos of trawl damage.
Just to add something of my own, I've spent most of this year working on the diets of some Grenadier fishes. These fish were taken as bycatch from an orange roughy fishery in NZ. Orange roughy are fished (mostly nowadays) on seamounts through bottom trawling and the damage to these ecosystems is immense. The point I want to make here is that ~70% of the diet of these grenadier fish turns out to be species new to science. That's not me saying err, I don't know what this is - so it must be new; it's me sending off samples to taxonomic experts in Australasia and them saying "it's a new species, or in some cases, it's a new genus".
We are destroying stuff before we even knew what it was, what it's role in the ecosystem was, what the implications of it not being there anymore are.
Who are we to say that these species don't matter.