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By commercial
fishing nets are pulled either close to the surface or directly over the bottom
of the sea. The surface nets are pulled in a circle around a shoal of fish and
then pulled together with a rope at the lower end like a bag. The gill net has
a mesh size, which is large enough to let through the head of the fish but let
the gills stuck.
How comes now the fish on your plate? Here some background information of today's
most frequent fishing methods:
Drift nets:
Drift nets stretching up to 60 kilometers (37 miles) are pulled through the seas.
These nets catch everything that's around, if usable or not. All non usable life
is called as bycatch and get thrown back in the water - no matter if injured or
dead. Not only small animals but also turtles, dolphins, sharks and even sperm
whales find their death in these cruel nets.
Just in the Mediterranean Sea approximately 600 Italian ships catch sword fish
with drift nets with an average length of 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) each. All
in a row you could stretch them twice from Gibraltar to Beirut. The bycatch is
extremely high: Only 18 percent of the caught animals are sword fish, the rest
are other kind of fish - for instance more than 8000 dolphins remain dead in the
sea each year.
Longlines:
A longline is a fishing line usually made of monofilament. The length of the line
generally ranges from 1.6 kilometer (1 mile) to as long as 100 kilometers (62
miles). The line is buoyed by styrofoam or plastic floats. Every hundred or so
feet, there is a secondary line attached extending down about 5m (16 feet). This
secondary line is hooked and baited with squid, fish or in some cases even with
fresh dolphin meat. The baited hooks can be seen by albatross from the air and
when they dive on the hooks, they are caught and they drown. Other forms of marine
wildlife see the bait from the waters below and get hooked when they try to eat
the bait.
Every year just along the African Atlantic Coast more than seven |
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million
sharks and rays die by longline fishing as bycatch. Also more than 34'000 birds
and more than 4'000 turtles die every single year only along this coast line.
Worldwide more than 100'000 Albatross die just because of the longline fishing
- each year.
The bycatch of commercial longline fishing for tunas can reach more than 90 percent.
They catch for example 4-5 times more sharks than tunas.
Dynamite:
Explosives are placed in the middle of shoals of fish or reefs. The explosions
are so strong that all the animals within the explosion area are paralyzed or
even killed. Only the dead fish lying on the surface after the explosion will
be collected. All the others remain injured or dead in the sea. If something like
that happens on land it is called terror attack - under water it's only a kind
of fishing!! Although dynamite fishing is prohibited in many areas it is still
illegally widespread.
All mentioned fishing methods not only kill unnecessary fish but directly contribute
to the extermination of the fish population. They are comparably with a farmer
who doesn't climb on the tree to pick the apples but cut down the whole tree to
get the fruits.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO more than 70 percent of
the fish existence are already overfished. Too many technically upgraded fishing
ships on the oceans are in competition with too little fish. Most of the fish
don't get old enough to reproduce themselves any longer.
Next time you have a fish on your plate think about how it had been caught before
you eat it with relish. Even if you are not responsible for the fishing method
it still has to concern you. The sentence "but it is already dead, so it
doesn't matter if I eat it or not" is naive and stupid because demand determines
supply!! With other words: As long as people eat fish, the fishing industry will
catch and deliver fish - until the seas are completely empty!
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