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Corals Nearly as Old as the Pyramids, and the Fight to Save Them · How To Protect The Ocean

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  Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, there's a coral colony that has already
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  been, like, a thousand years old.
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  It even been around as the pyramids were being built.
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  It's older than most of recorded human history, and a single pass of a trawling
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  net could wipe it out in seconds.
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  And that is the fight that my interview on Friday, the person
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  I'm interviewing on Friday found
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  themselves in negotiating in a windowless UN rooms.
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  and it's a fight that is still being decided this very year.
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  So, you know, when we talk about protecting the bottom of the ocean.
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  We talked last week about how there is room on the bottom, there's lots of life
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  on the bottom of the deep sea, whether it's on a seamount, whether it's in
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  the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, there is life on the bottom, and it's a habitat.
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  And rarely do we see habitats on the list of, like, when a trawl net goes
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  through, a bottom trawl net goes through.
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  It's not the fish that actually are bothered, it's the trawl destroys
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  the habitat where the fish go.
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  I mean, the fish go in, they're obviously bothered, they get caught, but it's
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  really the destruction that is caused by that trawl, that bottom trawl, that
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  actually scrapes the bottom of the ocean.
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  And whether it's in the deep sea or in the shallows, it gets destroyed.
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  And so the person that we're interviewing on Friday, I'm kinda doing a little bit of
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  a mystery here, they were part of what we call, like, the high seas discrete stocks.
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  So it's specifically bottom fishing and bottom trawling.
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  And this person was chairing the UN fisheries negotiations at the time.
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  And like I said before, what's actually being damaged is the habitat, not
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  the fish stocks itself necessarily.
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  Obviously, they're getting caught, but it's not as if they
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  can be degraded in one pass.
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  But the habitat can be destroyed, and if the habitat is destroyed,
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  the fish eventually will go away if there's enough habitat or there's
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  not enough habitat to live in.
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  ' Cause you gotta remember, fish need hiding spots.
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  They need food.
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  They need areas.
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  They need a home.
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  These habitats provide that home.
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  It's rare that you'll see a lot of bottom-dwelling fish that are
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  out in the open 'cause then they can get caught by predators.
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  They don't want that.
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  They wanna make sure that they can actually be protected, and
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  they can hide, and they can do what they need to do to survive.
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  So we have to protect the bottom.
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  We have to protect the habitats.
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  And I think, when you start to look at a lot of these corals that have
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  been growing for centuries, and some of them are thousands of years old.
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  Like, some of them have been dated, like, 4,270 years old off the coast of Hawaii.
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  These are Leiopathes species, right?
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  I think that's how you pronounce it, Leopathes species.
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  basically deep-water black coral.
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  And so the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers
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  dated those 4,270 years old.
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  It's one of the oldest living skeleton-building
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  marine organisms we know.
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  This is an organism that builds its corals as it grows up.
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  It takes a while to grow, but it has this intricate, like, habitat-forming ability.
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  Now, just a comparison when people say it's as almost as old as pyramids.
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  The Great Pyramid of Giza is roughly 4,500 years old, so it's
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  just about 250 years shy of that.
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  So it's a little bit younger, not older, but it's still important.
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  And that same research body that actually did the black coral aging,
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  they said that bottom trawling, commercial bottom trawling, is the
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  direct threat to these corals, alongside of, like, harvesting for jewelry and
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  things like that for these corals.
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  So, you can't just smash through this stuff.
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  You have to be careful.
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  You have to have rules so that you can sit there and enjoy the fruits of the
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  labor of these habitat-forming corals.
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  So as the problem that is at hand is that you have these slow-growing,
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  thousand-year-old corals that need to be protected because we need to protect
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  the fish, the longevity of the fish.
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  You want a sustainable fishery, you have to protect the habitats
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  that can house the fish.
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  Pretty simple.
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  It's not difficult to understand that concept.
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  Now, there has to be some kind of response to say, "Hey, we need to
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  protect this." So, there was a landmark international agreement negotiated by
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  the person I'm talking to on Friday, who was chairing the UN fisheries talks to
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  mitigate the impact of bottom fishing and bottom trawling on vulnerable seabeds.
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  They call it a step function change in how the type of fishery
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  is managed internationally.
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  And so I think this was the UN General Assembly Resolution 61/108 in 2006, right?
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  It's a landmark resolution that first called on states, and you have these
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  regional management organizations, regional fisheries management
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  organizations, which are these large organizational areas, management
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  organizations that are managed by a number of different countries.
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  Like, it depends on where they are.
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  They're all over the world, though.
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  They cover most of the world.
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  And so they protect vulnerable ecosystems like seamounts, hydrothermal vents,
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  cold water corals, anything of that nature from destructive bottom fishing.
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  And it's by conducting impact assessments and closing high seas areas where
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  these vulnerable marine ecosystems are known or likely to occur unless
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  proper safeguards are in place.
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  So I think it's a landmark policy 'cause it took probably about 13
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  years of the State Department's Office of Marine Conservation that engaged
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  in these fisheries negotiations regionally in the Pacific and globally
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  at the United Nations and FAO.
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  And, um, you know, there's a co-authored paper, like a law
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  review piece specifically on the UN fish stocks agreement review
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  process, all that kind of stuff.
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  So there's a lot of documentation on this.
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  And the negotiation that happened to create this protection and to
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  make sure that an impact assessment has to be done in areas that we
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  just don't know what's happening.
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  It doesn't always happen cleanly.
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  It doesn't always happen in the first try.
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  It doesn't say that, " Hey," you know, when I explained it
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  earlier, I said it's pretty simple.
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  You have these thousand-year-old corals that form this habitat to protect fish.
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  Without this habitat, there isn't gonna be any fish in that area.
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  They'll go somewhere else or they'll be caught really quickly.
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  So you have fisheries, bottom trawls, that come down and scrape the bottom
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  and destroy parts of the habitat, you get less fish 'cause there's not as much
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  habitat, or if there's habitat at all.
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  And those fish don't always come back ' cause the corals take
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  a long time to grow down there.
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  But if you say that to a policy, you say it to a bunch of countries, well,
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  they're just like, " The people in our country need to fish that area
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  because they depend on it for fisheries.
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  Their lives depend on it.
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  Their livelihoods depend on it.
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  Their kids depend on it.
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  Their families depend on it.
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  They're gonna continue to fish." So we are advocating for those people.
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  We are making sure that we can get, not only advocating for the people, but of
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  course the countries get money from this.
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  It's a big part of their GDP in some cases.
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  So the policy doesn't happen just clean, like, "Hey, we need to protect this area.
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  Yes, I agree.
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  That's how it's gonna happen.
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  Let's protect it." No, it doesn't happen that way.
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  I'm gonna talk a little bit about the drama that happened.
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  In November 2004, the UN General Assembly rejected an earlier push for an outright
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  moratorium on high seas bottom trawling.
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  And just like last week when we talked to Matthew Gianni, the Deep
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  Sea Conservation Coalition, which he's part of and co-founded, led
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  the campaign for a temporary ban.
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  Opposition led by Iceland and the EU, particularly Spain, defeated that ban
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  and responsibility for high seas bottom trawl of fishing was left to individual
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  nations and regional bodies instead.
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  So it didn't really help, you know, that first pass didn't really help.
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  Then two years later in 2006, the compromise that did pass was Resolution
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  61/105 Not a ban necessarily.
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  Again, it doesn't always happen the way we want, but a requirement for an impact
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  assessment and area closures, right?
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  This is like the step function change that the person of the subject of
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  Friday's interview was talking about.
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  It's where you get what you can get.
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  You can get something in there that everybody agrees
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  to as the base of this policy.
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  It's a real-world example of everything that happens in conservation.
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  It's never the perfect scenario because some countries or one
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  country or two countries or 10 countries want something different.
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  And when it comes to fishing, countries have a long culture in fishing, and
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  they wanna keep going to seeing what they're doing 'cause nobody's ever
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  told them to stop before, right?
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  So successful international policy is often the strong but imperfect deal that
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  keeps everyone in the tent, so everyone in the area, not the ideal income that we all
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  expect that advocates originally wanted.
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  It's never that.
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  Now, the story doesn't end in 2006 for this document, for
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  this regulation, this policy.
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  The UN has kept reviewing the implementation on a roughly
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  recurring cycle, every so often.
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  So, uh, in 2009, it sharpened the impact assessment and
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  stock assessment requirements.
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  In 2011, it required assessments to be made public, which it wasn't before, so
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  again, it's getting better and better.
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  In 2016, it tied assessments to FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization
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  guidelines, which is a UN body, and a further resolution followed in 2022.
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  As the years go on, as it gets reviewed and as they see how things are changing
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  or not changing, there are more restrictions and there's more added to
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  these guidelines and to these policies.
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  This is live right now.
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  It's a preparatory UN workshop on bottom fishing impacts on vulnerable
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  marine ecosystems that was held just this past year in July 13th and 14th at
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  UN headquarters in New York City, and feeding into like a full UN General
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  Assembly review later this year.
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  Now, the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition is publicly pushing for
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  a firm time-bound resolution to end bottom trawling on seamounts in
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  the high seas by the end of 2027.
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  And it ties into the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the
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  High Seas Treaty like what we're gonna be talking about in the next episode.
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  So everything is kinda connected.
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  All these policies are kinda relying on each other, or there's… As you
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  build this policy framework around the ocean, whether it's the high
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  seas, whether it's regional fisheries management organizations, it's
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  all tied together at some point.
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  They all overlap.
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  You have to remember, like the ocean floor holds these gorgeous
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  old living structures that are older than some of the buildings, like most
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  of the buildings in human history.
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  And industrial fishing gear can destroy them in single passes or
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  destroy parts of it in a single pass.
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  You gotta remember like a bottom trawl has the net of a certain size, and
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  when that drags across the bottom, it just picks up everything and could
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  destroy coral , and sponges that create the habitat for these fish.
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  There's other bottom species as well, but this is probably
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  ones we're most familiar with.
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  So fisheries management isn't only about, like fish population numbers, it's about
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  protecting the physical seafloor habitat.
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  And it's treated as its own public policy and its own priority.
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  Marine protected areas doesn't just protect fish, it protects
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  the habitat the fish live in.
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  When you can protect the bottom or where these fish are living,
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  you end up protecting the fish.
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  And actually that's an interesting segue is that when the Harper government got in
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  in Canada, they pretty much deregulated all habitat protection within the
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  Fisheries Act back in like 2012 to 2015, before the Trudeau government got in.
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  The reason why they did that, they said, "Hey, we just want to manage
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  fisheries, so we just wanna manage the fish, not the habitats that
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  they go in, that they live in.
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  We just wanna manage the fisheries, the commercial fisheries.
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  That's all we should manage.
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  We shouldn't manage anything else," even though they were related.
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  But they didn't care about that because probably one of their supporters wanted
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  to fish more, and they paid a lot of money for their campaign to get that done.
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  So in Corbin when the Fisheries Act was later revised by the
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  Trudeau administration, they started to put in more protections.
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  They put back the habitat requirement for protection, and they added more
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  protections into the Fisheries Act to make sure that it can't just be changed
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  just willy-nilly as a government comes through and wants to give more to oil
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  and gas and other types of resource intensive exploitation businesses.
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  Now, going back to this bottom trawling, policy, the 2006 protections for
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  seamounts and corals were a hard-fought compromise, by getting those extra things
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  like getting the impact assessments after an outright trawling ban failed in 2004.
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  So they went for everything.
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  They couldn't get it, they went for the next best thing.
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  And then the fight, like the same fight over how far to go is playing
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  out again and again and now in the 2026 in the UN review, so
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  hopefully we'll be able to get that.
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  And so, the person I'm gonna be interviewing on Friday states that,
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  like, whether the resolution is agreement that you want to happen, you know,
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  they remember about getting it passed after a 2004 moratorium push failed.
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  And what they make out of is the new push happening this year to actually
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  end seamount trawling by 2027.
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  It's a step-by-step process to get things done.
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  Things don't happen quickly.
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  And I think a lot of the times when we look at putting in regulations, I
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  think those of us who are not familiar with how policies are made realize
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  that we can't just wait till the last minute to protect oceans, to protect
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  the planet from climate change.
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  We need to push forward and actually be able to put in policy
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  as soon as possible, because we know it's not gonna be perfect.
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  We know we're gonna have to build on it every year, every two years, every
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  recurring certain interval where we can get it better and better and better.
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  So we may not get exactly what we want in the first pass, but by putting
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  it together, history has shown that we can make them better, we can make
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  them tougher and protect better.
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  And as we start to see successes or even some failures, we can really start to
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  rethink, be like, "This isn't working.
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  We need to try this.
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  This is working really well.
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  Let's continue with this.
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  Let's expand on it." And without having that as a tool and as a
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  policy tool, we become just sort of dead in the water, no pun intended.
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  If you wanna help the ocean, you help the people who want to pass the policies.
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  Whether they're perfect or not.
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  They're doing the best they can to get to perfect, but they can't.
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  They can't just get a ban on trawling, as this example covered,
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  but they can get close to a ban on trawling, and that's what matters.
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  And that's what matters as we move forward.
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  It helps our oceans bit by bit, step by step.
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  Okay?
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  That's it for today's episode.
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  Love to hear your thoughts.
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  Let me know if you want to hit me up on my socials, links in the show notes.
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  And of course, don't forget to follow this podcast if you like this kind of
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  information, and share with a friend.
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  Like, talk about it with people.
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  Talk about the policies that are put in place.
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  Talk about how there needs to be a step-by-step approach, and that the
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  first policy that's put in place on a specific subject like trawling, like deep
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  sea trawling, doesn't always work out.
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  And we need to build on that as we go through, but we
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  need to act fast to do it.
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  That's how we build strong protections for the oceans worldwide,
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  not just country by country.
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  But anyway, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of
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  the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
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  Have a great day.
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  We'll talk to you tomorrow, and happy conservation.