On behalf of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition

New Zealand scientists have confirmed that deep sea bottom trawl fishing is causing severe and long-lasting damage to our deep-sea coral forests and other fragile ecosystems.

These deep-sea corals – found on seamounts (underwater mountains) – are the ‘kauri of the deep sea’, growing slowly but living many hundreds of years. And like New Zealand's precious kauri trees, they are in immediate danger. These seamounts and the corals found on them provide the habitat for countless species – they are teeming with marine life, and new deep sea creatures are being discovered there all the time.

Fishing companies drag heavily weighted nets across the seabed to catch fish like orange roughy and in the process they smash and destroy deep sea corals and sponges. Recent studies show that even 20 years after bottom trawling is stopped, heavily trawled seamounts are still trashed and only just starting to show the first tiny signs of recovery.

Not only has New Zealand’s fishing industry inflicted this damage on our own deep-sea coral forests, but some of our trawl companies are doing the same damage in the international waters of the South Pacific Ocean.

New Zealand is now the only country whose fishing fleets are still smashing up the South Pacific in this way.  In the past decade, New Zealand companies have been prosecuted for trawling in closed areas in New Zealand waters and the high seas of the South Pacific, trawling up deep-sea corals without reporting them properly, and even trawling in a marine reserve off Kaikoura.

In 2006, New Zealand joined the call by the United Nations to protect vulnerable marine ecosystems from destructive fishing practices. And yet, almost twenty years on, New Zealand's fishing companies are still smashing the seabed, and leaning on the government to allow them to continue this destructive practice.

In New Zealand waters, companies trawl repeatedly on seamounts where they drag up corals as bycatch - there’s no law to stop them, even though these are protected species under the Wildlife Act. And under the rules for the South Pacific international waters, vessels are allowed to catch up to 60 kg of corals in a single trawl, or almost 100 kg of corals and anemones together, before they have to move their fishing spot. What’s more, the bycatch that comes up in the trawl net is only a fraction of the damage caused on the seabed.

It is time to call it a day for this destructive fishery. New Zealand must end bottom trawl fishing on seamounts, in Aotearoa and the South Pacific, and instead support research and protection of these deep-sea taonga (treasures).

Photo credit: NOAA