Most of the eating houses offering seafood have said that they work directly with their harvesters and purveyors to ensure that their seafood is only acquired from sustainable fisheries. It is told that whether it is blue marlin from the Philippines, ono from Hawaii, and petrale sole and rockfish from British Columbia, all have to be sustainable.
It is true that the sole and the snapper are caught by bottom trawlers. Ono is caught on pelagic long lines. The last time either petrale sole or rockfish (Box 1) they were flopping about the mucous-smeared deck of a bottom trawler. Sea observer states that struggling between debilitating waves of seasickness to tally the grab bag of fish scraped from their bottom lairs. The sole were as brown and flat as old cow patties, the rockfish as orange as Creamsicles.
It is observed that fish harvested by bottom trawling not even remotely sustainable. A bottom trawler is simply a large fishing vessel that drags a vast, weighted net along the bottom of the ocean with the intention of capturing bottom-dwelling fish. Picture a barefoot child dragging a butterfly net along the bottom of a shallow pond in an attempt to catch tadpoles.
Bottom trawlers are particularly unsustainable for three reasons: they catch a great deal of fish and thus guarantee over-harvest, they are non
Bottom trawlers have the pattern of over-harvest and bottom trawlers precipitated the collapse of the cod fishery in the northwest Atlantic. The northern stock was harvested by hook and line for centuries, but it took only four decades of bottom trawling to destroy one of the largest sources of wild protein on the planet. The only reason bottom trawling has persisted into this millennia is that it is entirely out of sight, over the watery horizon and many leagues under the sea.
