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- Bottom Trawling
Bottom trawling is a fishing method in which huge nets are dragged along the ocean floor, collecting all the sea life in their wake. These nets are sometimes equipped with chains that slap the seabed, sending fish such as flounder and cod up into the mesh, and causing serious damage to the habitat by removing vegetation and organisms such as coral and sea sponges. An official from the Marine Conservation Biology Institute once described the process as akin to "hanging a huge net dragged from a blimp across a forest, knocking down the trees and scooping up the plants and animals, and then throwing away everything except the deer." Worldwide, nearly 6 million square miles of ocean floor are swept clean by bottom trawling nets every year, an area twice the size of the lower 48 states. In 1948, the largest trawlers weighed some 1,216 tons. Today, the American Monarch super-trawler weighs in at 6,730 tons and is as long as a football field. It can process 1.3 million pounds of fish every day, which are caught in nets several miles long, and fishes for a plethora of extremely valuable fish species including blue whiting, hoki, shrimp, and Pollack. In 1997 Chile, Panama, Argentina, and Peru banned the American Monarch from fishing their waters. The boat remained docked in Seattle for 18 months until, in 1998, in a joint venture with the Russian government, the ship was sent to the Sea of Okhotsk in the Western Bearing Sea to fish for pollack roe. CREDIT: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
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- Bycatch
"Bycatch" refers to the unwanted fish captured unintentionally by commercial fishing methods, such as purse seining, longlining, and trawling/dragging, in which nets are used to catch large amounts of fish. The animals pictured here will be thrown back into the ocean, dead, or on the verge of dying. For every pound of shrimp that is trawled, it has been estimated that between two to ten pounds of sea life is caught and discarded as bycatch. Sea turtles are particularly vulnerable to trawling nets. It was in response to this that U.S. fishermen invented the Turtle Excluder Device (TED), a trap door that allows sea turtles and other creatures to escape nets and which is now required on U.S. shrimp boats. Still, catching shrimp in traps is even more effective -- allowing fishermen to release 98-percent of unwanted animals alive. CREDIT: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
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- Hook and Line
Although it may look gruesome, hook and line fishing is one of the more ocean-friendly methods fishermen use. The practice, also known as pole and line fishing, consists of hooking fish with live bait and then, if the catch is too large, spearing them with rods in order to contain movement and assist in getting them aboard. This creates less in the way of bycatch and habitat damage. Here, fishermen wrangle with tuna, which -- along with mahi-mahi and other large pelagic fish -- are the target species for hook and line fishing. Compared to other methods used to harvest tuna, such as longlining or purse seining, hook and line is far easier on the environment. CREDIT: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
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- Chesapeake Dreams
More than 64,000 square miles of land, covering six states, drain into the Chesapeake Bay -- which is listed on the EPA's "impaired waters" list, under the Clean Water Act. Although thirty years of restoration efforts have succeeded in stemming the bay's decline, there is much work left to make it clean and safe. In the summer of 2004, nearly 35-percent of the bay was considered a Dead Zone -- so depleted of oxygen that no aquatic life could possibly survive there. Blue crab populations are small, if steady. And in 2004, the commercial oyster harvest in Maryland sank to an historic low. 99% of the eastern oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay has disappeared since the late 19th Century. Virginia had more than 400 oyster shucking houses in the 1950s. Only about 15 remain. Yet there are promising new approaches to oyster aquaculture in Virginia and hope for the rockfish population, which was declared recovered in 1995. For this progress to become a true success story, however, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has called for more leadership, funding, and closer enforcement of existing environmental laws. CREDIT: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
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- Catch of the Day
Off the coast of New England, a lobster is caught in a thin mesh of netting that hangs down into the water from floats and is invisible to most fish, which swim into the net and get their gills caught. Gillnets are intended to catch large species like cod and other groundfish, but unintentionally take in other creatures such as lobsters and turtles. The oldest American fishing area, the waters of Georges Bank off New England have supported commercial fishing for centuries. However from the 1960s to the early 1990s, severe over-fishing of cod, the region's signature fish, depleted stocks by more than 70%. The federal government attempted to reduce the number of boats in the New England fleet by spending $24 million on buy-out schemes and the scrapping of boats. Days at sea were cut by more than half and certain waters closed to fishing. But most fish populations have not come back. An estimated 20,000 fishing-related jobs in New England have been lost. CREDIT: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
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- Lobster Luck
In Point Judith, Rhode Island, a lobster boat is loaded with skates for bait. Recently, after lobster populations soared in the early-1990s, the waters of Rhode Island, Cape Cod, and Long Island Sound have been curiously short of lobsters. Maine, meanwhile, which receives nearly 750 million dollars from its fishing industry, has been experiencing a lobster boom. Although no definite explanation has been found to explain Maine's current bounty, one theory relates to the conservation tactics employed by fisherman in the Gulf of Maine, who cut V-shaped notches into the tails of female lobsters, marking them as illegal catch and thereby allowing more females to survive and reproduce. Lobsters are one of few species which can be returned to the sea alive, unlike most by-catch. In the meantime, scientists and fishermen alike remain wary of how to prevent their boom from turning to bust. CREDIT: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
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- Overfishing
In recent years, fishermen in California have had to adjust to smaller catches and increased government regulation. During the 1980s, the stocks of several commercially important fish species found in California waters, such as the rockfish (sold in restaurants as red snapper), were decimated by overfishing and poor resource management. Biologists predict it will take 50 to 100 years for the rockfish stocks to recover if fishing for them is halted. In 2002, the Pacific Fishery Management Council banned bottom fishing for rockfish on most of the continental shelf from Canada to Mexico, putting the livelihoods of an estimated 1,200 to 1,800 commercial fishermen in jeopardy. In an effort to preserve its troubled marine ecosystems, the California Legislature passed laws in the late-1990s which established protected marine reserves and limited catches to encourage sustainable fishing practices. Though California fishers have increasingly caught other species, like sardines and squid, individual fishing vessels in the Monterey Bay region declined by an average of 40-percent from 1981 to 2000. CREDIT: William B. Folsom/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
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- Certified Sustainable
Alaska's salmon fisheries are a bright spot in the commercial fishing industry today. Alaskan salmon stocks remain healthy and plentiful due to a number of factors, including careful government regulation of fishing areas and catches, population management by biologists, and the banning of large salmon farms that could endanger wild stocks or their environment. In 2000, Alaska salmon became the world's first fishery to be certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. Fishermen in the Pacific Northwest have not been as lucky, with salmon populations in the Columbia River Basin plummeting by 98% in the last decade due to dams and hydropower plants in the river basin, habitat loss, and over-fishing. Above: a fisherman walks across a dock in Sitka, Alaska. CREDIT: Jon Campbell
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- Marine Reserves
Sea turtle populations have been devastated from being hunted for their meat and shells, human encroachment of their nesting beaches, pollution, and the commercial fishing industry. In the past, shrimping nets killed more than 50,000 turtles annually, but today that number has declined significantly in the U.S. due to the mandatory use of Turtle Excluder Devices, or TEDs, which allow up to 97-percent of turtles to escape trawl nets. Responding to the ecological degradation of U.S coastal waters, in 1990 Congress designated 2,800 square nautical miles off the tip of southern Florida as the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in order to protect the diverse and fragile habitat found there. Environmentalists are hopeful that such measures will allow some endangered turtle species, such as the green turtle seen here swimming above a coral reef in the Keys Sanctuary, a chance to rebound from their dwindling numbers. The Keys Sanctuary is one of 13 national marine sanctuaries in the United States, protecting a variety of oceans environments from oceal reefs off the Hawaiin islands to the rocky coast of Washington State to whale migratory grounds near Massachussetts. The sanctuaries are subject to regulation, but activities such as recreation, shipping, and even commercial fishing are not necessarily prohbited. But the conservation benefits offered by marine reserves are undeniable. A recent review of 73 reserves around the world showed that the density, size, diversity, and overall biomass of fish inside these sites are significantly higher than outside the reserves. At present, less than 0.5% of the world's oceans are protected. CREDIT: Alan Bunn/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
