AR-News: Aggressive Fishing Threatens Oceans-UN

[Adam Weissman, Wetlands Preserve]

Top Science and Health News
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BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - The United Nations sounded an alarm over 
the health of the world's oceans Friday, warning that aggressive 
fishing threatened little-understood corals it called "kindergartens 
of the oceans."

Mysterious cold water corals -- some 8,000 years old -- help nurture 
young fish and if they are destroyed it could be hard to restore the 
world's depleted fish stocks, according to research released before 
Saturday's World Environment Day.

This year's events, from a port cleanup in 2004 Olympics host city 
Athens to the launch of an international photographic competition, 
focus on risks to marine life.

The United Nations Environment Program said the corals, cousins of 
creatures that build better-known tropical reefs, can live in sunless 
waters up to 3.5 miles deep and are home to a wide variety of marine 
life.

They are particularly threatened by 'bottom trawling,' which involves 
pulling huge weighted nets behind ships. The nets drag along the sea 
floor scooping up all the marine life in their way -- from valuable 
fish to inedible species and delicate corals.

"Everyone must be aware (that) without intact coral reefs, warm and 
cold water reefs, you will not be able to restore fish stocks fully," 
UNEP head Klaus Toepfer said in an interview.

"This is another alarm call to ... change the techniques of fishing, 
especially bottom trawling which has quite disastrous consequences 
for these kindergartens of fish," he told Reuters.

Greenpeace also called Friday for an immediate ban on high-seas 
bottom trawling, saying it can alter the ocean floor in a way that 
prevents coral growing back.

VORACIOUS APPETITE

Environmentalists trying to persuade governments to cut back on 
fishing to protect reefs and precarious fish stocks are up against a 
formidable enemy, however -- a voracious international appetite for 
seafood.

 From sushi in Tokyo to fish and chips in London, consumer demand 
drives a market worth an estimated $75 billion a year and also 
supports jobs in coastal areas of many countries where other 
employment options can be limited.

Fishing of more usual commercial species is depleting stocks at an 
alarming rate, and a target to replenish overfished waters by 2015 is 
still far off, Toepfer said.

But tumbling numbers of traditional favorites like cod only encourage 
some fishermen to turn to more exotic deep sea options like orange 
roughy or blue ling.

The fate of these fish is intimately tied to that of the slow-growing 
cold-water corals they live in and around, and it can be hard to 
catch them without damaging or destroying the reefs.

Even if deep sea fishing is scaled back, however, seabed 
telecommunications cables, waste dumping and fossil fuel prospecting 
would still threaten the fragile coral beds, which scientists say are 
more extensive than they originally thought.

Found in seas from Norway to New Zealand, some of those in the east 
Atlantic have already been destroyed.

And there is little hope of any short-term recovery for the reefs, 
which Toepfer said could also hold the key to new medicines or 
industrial products. The cold water corals grow at one-tenth the rate 
of their tropical cousins.



Reuters
Jun 4 2004 1:12PM


SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT-CORALS-DC



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