The trawling industry is crippling with the unintended effect of protecting one of the province’s least known and most vulnerable deep-sea fish. It is said that the species is the longspine thornyhead, a type of rockfish that has adapted to the crushing water pressure and near-zero-oxygen environment found a kilometre below the surface. Harvested by bottom trawlers primarily off the west coast of Vancouver Island, these fish can survive five months between meals, live up to 50 years, and possess eyeballs so unusually bulbous and leering that fishermen refer to them as “idiotfish.”
Fisheries analyst Scott Wallace of the David Suzuki Foundation told that B.C.’s bottom-trawl fisheries are among the best managed in the world, but this is not one of them. He has been calling for a moratorium on the longspine thornyhead harvest since March. According to him this is a case where high fuel prices have achieved conservation gains faster than anything else.
It is noticed that thornyheads are caught by a fuel-intensive fishing method known as bottom trawling, in which a weighted net is dragged along the ocean floor. Brian Mose is co-owner of the trawler Frosti, the only vessel to fish for thornyheads so far in 2008, and he says fuel is the most serious factor keeping trawlers tied to the dock. He added that he can deal with the exchange rate of Canadian dollar but fuel is killing him.
Another problem that threatens the trawling industry is the changes in the Japanese seafood market, which is the sole destination for longspine thornyheads harvested from B.C. waters. It is said that the cumulative effect has been a dramatic decline in fishing effort: The thornyhead fishery has gone from about 12 vessels at its peak in 1999 to just one so far this year.
