Bottom trawling is a practice involving fishing vessels that drag huge, weighted nets across the ocean floor. Now the authority of has decided to closed major part of Bering Sea for bottom trawling. It is said that nearly 180,000 square miles of the Bering Sea will be closed to bottom trawling, bringing the total in the Pacific Ocean to 830,000 square miles — an area more than five times the size of California.
Besides, other newly restricted areas are off Washington, Oregon and California. It is true that conservation groups have long fought the practice of bottom trawling, calling it an outdated form of fishing that pulverizes delicate corals and sponges living on the sea floor. According to scientists it can take centuries for the slow-growing corals and sponges to recover, if they ever do, after bottom trawlers move through an area.
Chris Krenz, Oceana’s arctic project manager, said that bottom trawling is no less that forest clear-cutting. He added that in the northern Bering Sea, many animals rely on the crabs and clams that grow on the ocean floor for food. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which advises the federal government on fisheries, unanimously voted in favor of the northern Bering Sea regulation in June. It is informed that in Alaska, bottom trawlers will be allowed to work about 150,000 square miles, mostly around the Aleutian and Pribil of islands.
Jim Ayers, vice president of Oceana, said the regulation essentially puts the northern Bering Sea off-limits to bottom trawlers. He further told that the fishing vessels had not been consistently venturing into the area but were starting to. He told that the effects of climate change in the Bering Sea, combined with bottom trawling, could have devastated essential fish habitat.
