Chris Benfield
THE fishing industry has taken at least five kinds of Atlantic fish to the brink of extinction in two decades of deep-sea trawling, new research shows.
The lethal fishing patterns concerned are still doing damage – and more species not included in the survey are likely to be suffering similar devastation.
The report, in the journal Nature, adds hard evidence to suspicions that piecemeal regulation has pushed the over-fishing problem into new areas where it does even more damage.
The study looked at fish which swim in deep and ever-cold water, where growth and reproduction are slow and damage to populations lasts for a long time.
And it raises the alarm over the roundnose grenadier, the onion-eye grenadier, the deep-sea spiny eel, the spiny-back skate and blue hake.
Fishing crews have been hunting deeper and deeper since the 1970s when the European partners began to try to regulate the exploitation of fast-breeding species in the shallow waters of the continental shelfs (up to 200 metres of depth), such as cod, haddock and herring.
There have since been many warnings about the damage to deeper-swimming fish but, until now, according to the Nature report, nobody has checked the available data against the "endangered species" criteria laid down by the World Conservation Union.
The report, by a university team in Newfoundland, Canada, says: "We use research-survey data to show that fives species of deep-sea fish have declined, in the Canadian waters of the northwest Atlantic, to such an extent that they meet the criteria for being critically endangered. Urgent action is needed."
The team gathered data from research trawls between 1978 and 1994 and found that, at the end of that period, the five species had less than a tenth of the numbers they started with.
Survey data from 1995 to 2003 for two of the species – the roundnose grenadier and the onion-eye grenadier – showed they had been reduced in numbers by 99.6 per cent and 93.3 per cent over the 26 years.
In both cases, most of the damage was probably done in less than 10 years, because the roundnose grenadier was becoming hard to find in the 1980s so attention switched to its cousin, and both were in trouble by 1995.
The report says the declines happened within 15 to 17 years and the Canadians say they could all be extinct within 25 years.
Grenadiers are an acceptable substitute for cod in many countries. There are some markets for blue hake and spiny-back skate but they are mainly a "by-catch" of deep trawls for halibut. And the spiny eel is simply an unwanted, accidental victim of fishing for other species.
An Oxford University expert on fish, Peter Henderson, who also runs a consultancy called Pisces Conservation, said: "You are talking about some butt-ugly fish, which most people in this country would not touch.
"But the Japanese, for example, regard sea life as there to be eaten and will pay top prices for an extraordinary range of it.
"And nowadays, the whole trade is international. There is a huge business in gathering whelks in this country to send to Korea."
He said that, although the study was done in Canadian waters, there was no reason to think things were better on our side of the Atlantic or anywhere else.
"Marine biologists have been issuing the warnings from all over the place but, until now, we have never had the real evidence that they are right," he said.
"It is very expensive to study animals at these depths and the Canadians have done well to pull together enough information to work with."
A spokesman for the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations in Grimsby said Yorkshire fishing boats were not much involved in the deep fishing under discussion but some members were. They shared some of the conservationists' concerns and were willing to discuss them.
Bernadette Clarke, fisheries officer of the Marine Conservation Society, said: "The trouble is, this is the way it always happens. A new kind of fishery starts up and then the scientists try to catch up and measure what is happening and by then it is hard to persuade anyone to stop. We have to start doing the research first. We know very little about the deep-water environment and we do not know the ramifications that over-exploiting it will have on a complex eco-system."
Paul Johnston, principal scientist in a Greenpeace research centre at Exeter University, said: "We knew the problem but the figures are startling and should focus minds on the need for an immediate ban on deep-sea trawling. There are complex political considerations, of course, and we say it is up to the UN to take on the challenge."
John Gordon, a deep-sea expert with the Scottish Association of Marine Science, said: "The round-nose grenadier is a target species on our side of the Atlantic. The rest would be caught incidentally, if at all, but anything you bring up from 1,000 metres is dead anyway."
chris.benfield@ypn.co.uk