As the seals grow, the ‘noose’ slowly tightens around their necks. Young seals playing with discarded plastic rings put their heads through them. He called for the immediate designation of 127 conservation zones to protect 23,000 square miles of British offshore waters.īut even if it escapes the all-consuming sweep of the nets, there are plenty of other threats to oceanic life. Sir David Attenborough warned this weekend that time is running out to save our seas. Nets miles-long catch sharks, seals and dolphins, leaving them to die an agonising death.Īs Professor Roberts points out, the fishing fleets in the Gulf of Mexico kill more marine life in a single day than the oil spill of Deepwater Horizon did in many months. Indiscriminate trawling wrecks the sea bed. Yet still we go on plundering fish as if the sea was inexhaustible. Now: Today the catches at the same spot are scanty and mere tiddlers by comparison to those caught in the 1950s at the same spot By the end of the 20th century, the cod was almost extinct in those same waters, with fish such as the bluefin tuna about to follow. It was said you could walk on water because there were so many cod in the sea.īut then came electronic fish-finders and ever-bigger nets.
Once, the seas off the fittingly-named Cape Cod and Newfoundland were so full you had only to lower a net for it to be filled. Meanwhile, the latest research shows that today’s fishing fleets are landing just six per cent of the catch that they were taking 120 years ago. In the 1980s, at the same spot, the fish caught are a fraction their size, while today’s recreational fishermen at the same quay show off their catch of tiddlers. 1980s: Three decades later at the same spot the fish caught are a fraction of the sizeĪs graphic evidence of this calamity, Professor Roberts shows pictures of fish landed in Key West, Florida, in the 1950s, where bare-chested big game fishermen pose with their enormous catch - fish with names like Goliath Groupers that dwarf the people on the quayside.
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