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Is Bottom Trawling Always Bad? It Depends Where · How To Protect The Ocean

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  off the south coast of England, about 100 kilometers out, there's
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  a granite reef called Hog Frost covered in jewel anemones and corals.
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  And on paper it had been protected for years, but heavy fishing
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  gear could still drag across it.
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  So is it really protected?
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  In March 2024, that finally changed.
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  And here's why where we fish matters as much as how much we fish of it.
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  We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How
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  to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
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  I am a marine biologist and science communicator here to tell you all about
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  the ocean, covering ocean news, ocean science, ocean conservation, the whole
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  gambit, so that you can understand the ocean better and maybe lessen some of
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  that ocean anxiety or climate anxiety you might be having, or questions around
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  the ocean that you might be having.
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  I'm here to help answer any of those.
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  So if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with me.
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  If you're listening to this on Spotify, there's a comment section,
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  I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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  If you're listening to this on YouTube, which I'll be posting, uh, this on, you
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  can hit me up in the comments below.
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  And if you are listening to this on your favorite podcast app, 'cause
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  this is an audio-only podcast for most part, you can hit me up on my socials.
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  The links are in the show notes.
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  Now, we've been covering how many fish we take and, what else ends up in the
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  net over the last couple of episodes.
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  And on Monday, I talked to Dr. David Shiffman, who wrote Why Sustainable
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  Seafood Matters, and you can pre-order that right now if you really wanna get
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  into sustainable seafood conversation.
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  Today's all about where we fish and what we do to the sea floor while we're at it.
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  it's gonna be an interesting show today, because there's a lot of, like, recent
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  documentaries, ocean documentaries, that you've seen the footage, like a heavy
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  net drags along the bottom, a cloud of sediment, and a scar on the sea floor,
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  on the, documentary last year, Ocean, narrated by Sir David
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  Attenborough, was a very enlightening, documentary for a lot of people.
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  I took my daughter there, who's in wildlife biology.
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  It was emotional.
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  You saw this beautiful reef, and it was wonderful.
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  And you saw, like, all these anemones, and it was very productive on the bottom,
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  it was so, like teeming with life, invertebrates, fish, all this kinda thing.
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  They mounted cameras on a trawl, and the trawl went right through it.
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  And it was a protected area and everything like that, and it's just
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  like, wow, it just destroyed everything.
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  You can hear the sniffles, and you see people crying, including my
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  daughter, and even made me emotional to see all that productive habitat
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  be gone Now, the message that the movie created it was simple.
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  It was like, ban it.
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  Ban it everywhere, but it leaves you to wondering, like, whether every piece
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  of cod or shrimp you've ever eaten came from those bulldozed sea floor.
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  Today I want to give you that clear picture, one that takes the harm
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  seriously, that, of trawls, we know that it, but still leaves room for solutions
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  that can actually be passed into law, To look at how we can better protect
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  things in, like the items and the life in marine protected areas, as well as
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  worldwide, and making sure that we are only trawling in places that it won't
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  harm anybody, if we are trawling at all.
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  Now, I did my master's on marine protected area design, this is the episode
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  where, like, I get to geek out a little bit, and I'm looking forward to that.
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  So I want you to just go through, like, what a trawl net is, so a
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  trawl is a net, like, essentially pulled through the water, and
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  there are two very different kinds.
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  There's a midwater trawl, which moves through open water and never touches the
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  bottom, and then there's bottom trawls dragging along the sea floor, over
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  sponges, corals, seagrasses or reefs.
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  And they can do enormous damage to that habitat because once they go through and
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  ruin that habitat, that, line, however wide that net is, will just scrape
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  all that stuff off for the most part,
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  it leaves these visible scars.
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  it's basically clearing a forest, like, to catch rabbits essentially,
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  that's what it's kind of analogous to.
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  That's the harm in the documentaries and in those places that it's real,
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  Like, I wanna just kinda give context that usually gets left out.
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  Bottom trawling provides about a quarter of the world's wild-caught seafood, about
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  19 million tons a year, and much of it comes from sand and muddy bottoms that
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  recovery happens relatively quickly.
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  And in 2018, a large study mapped bottom trawling in fine detail
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  across many regions around the world, and in the regions studied, about
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  14% of the sea floor was trawled.
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  It ranged from less than half a percent off southern Chile to 80% of
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  parts of the Adriatic Sea Now, two findings stand out from this study.
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  Trawling happens in the same places year after year, and the regions
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  were less than about 10% of the sea floor that was trawled almost
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  always had sustainably fished stocks.
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  So the more useful question is where, how much, and what's living there?
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  'Cause that's an important aspect, and that's why some
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  bottom trawl fisheries hold Marine Stewardship Council certification
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  and good seafood guide ratings.
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  And it depends on the place and the rules.
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  And this is a lot of where people have a problem, especially with the Marine
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  Stewardship Council certification, because they're like, "Well, how can they say
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  that trawling is okay? That they shouldn't be saying this." But I guess it really
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  depends on where it's being trawled, and studies have shown that sometimes
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  these areas are not, like, terrible.
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  In 2018, a team from Dalhousie University and Germany's GEOMAR looked
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  at 727 marine protected areas across the European Union, and these were
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  places governments had officially designated to protect ocean life.
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  So the idea around these marine protected areas, Like, it's really two things.
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  you're trying to protect biodiversity, so you're trying to protect all the
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  animals and the habitats in there.
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  But you might also be, protecting fisheries.
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  So you have a specific commercial fishery or a number of commercial
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  fisheries where this is an important habitat for those fish.
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  And those fish can show in the number and the size, and then the idea is it'll have
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  a spillover effect over the boundaries.
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  So if nobody fishes within those boundaries, those fish will actually
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  grow bigger and more of them, and they're gonna spill over because they
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  have to compete for food and habitat, and they gotta look for some of those.
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  And the fishermen will be able to fish there.
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  They found in this study where they looked at marine protected areas
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  and what was happening in them, they found that commercial trawling it was
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  happening in at least 59% of them.
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  And on average, trawling was 38% more intense inside the protected areas
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  than in the nearby unprotected water.
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  In the most heavily trawled areas, sensitive species like sharks,
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  skates, and rays had declined by 69%.
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  And one of those authors, Boris Worm, put it this way: "- when industrial
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  use is elevated rather than reduced in protected areas, we are not getting the
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  conservation outcomes that we need."
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  We call these paper parks, when you're not really protecting what's there.
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  You're allowing some kind of extractive activity to happen, whether it's fisheries
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  or oil and gas or whatever that might be.
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  And it just becomes a line on the map, a boundary, an invisible boundary that
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  nobody's really paying attention to with the same activity going on inside it,
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  which is what you were supposed to stop.
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  And it isn't only Europe that it was happening.
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  Around the world, MPAs get announced with great fanfare,
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  and then left without any type of rules or enforcement or funding.
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  We've talked about that on numerous times on this podcast.
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  Some are even, like, drawn in places where the species like, they were
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  meant to save doesn't even live.
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  And so MPA is important, but it's also important to have the data, to have the
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  management, to have the enforcement.
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  And when an MPA is done well, the results are remarkable.
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  A global review found fish biomass about 570% higher in no-take marine
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  reserves than in unprotected areas, I should say that figure was corrected in
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  2025 from an earlier higher number, so science is already correcting itself,
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  and that's a good thing, to be honest.
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  Now, a study in 87 MPAs worldwide found five features that make the
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  difference: no fishing allowed, strong enforcement, more than 10 years old,
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  larger than 100 square kilometers, and isolated by deep water or sand.
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  MPAs with four or five of those filters had five times more
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  large fish and 14 times more shark biomass than fished areas.
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  Let's go back to the 59% of the MPA studies had only one
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  or two of these features.
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  And to be honest about the limits, an MPA can't stop warming water, acidification,
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  or an oil spill drifting in from the outside, or plastic pollution.
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  It's a powerful tool for biodiversity and fisheries with a specific job, but it
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  can only do that if it's properly managed and everything else around it is good.
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  It kinda leaves it for the, ecosystem to just kind of recover on its own.
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  Now, England has dozens of marine protected areas in its offshore waters.
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  So for years, many of them allowed bottom-towed fishing, gear to be
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  dragged across the very habitats they were created to protect.
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  And in June 2022, the Marine Management Organization, the agency that regulates
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  English seas, brought in its first bylaws banning bottom-towed gear
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  in four offshore sites, including Dogger Bank, a huge sandbank in the
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  North Sea, and the canyons, deep underwater valleys of the southwest.
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  In January 2023, it proposed going further and opened a public consultation.
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  Anyone can comment, fishers, scientists, conservation groups, ordinary citizens.
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  And on March 22nd, 2024, the bylaw took effect.
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  Bottom-towed gear were banned over sensitive reef habitats in 13 more
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  marine protected areas, covering about 4,000 square kilometers.
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  Places like Haig Frass, a granite reef with jewel anemones and cup corals, Cape
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  Bank and its sea urchins and cushion starfish, Goodwin Sands with the sea fans
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  it was very important to protect these.
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  So together, those bylaws protect almost 18,000 square kilometers of
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  English seabed from bottom-towed gear.
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  The agency reported high compliance with the rules in the first sites, and so
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  with very few infringements detected.
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  that's a really good thing 'cause the enforcement's there.
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  And that is what matching the rules to the habitat looks like.
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  Trawling carried over sand and mud elsewhere, like, that's fine.
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  It stays off the reefs that can't take it, and it allows for, like, mud habitats and
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  sand habitats to recover because there's no overarching habitat, like a sponge
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  reef or, like, very sensitive reefs with anemones and all these kind of things
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  that will take a long time to recover.
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  What's nice about this, it also happened through a public process.
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  People showed up, they commented, and that matters for today's call to action,
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  and we're gonna talk about that in just a sec. Now I just wanted a quick turn
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  to talk about aquaculture because the same principle applies in aquaculture.
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  In 2022, the first time ever, farms produced more of the world's aquatic
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  animals than the wild fisheries did, 51%, about 94 million tons.
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  And if you eat shrimp or salmon, you've almost certainly eaten farmed seafood.
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  I think in Canada or here in Ontario, most of our salmon, unless
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  you catch it yourself, is farmed.
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  It is very expensive to try and get wild caught, and it happens every once
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  in a while, but most of it's farming.
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  Fish farming gets painted as all good or all bad, and like trawling, it
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  depends on how or where it's done.
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  What fish are fed, how waste and disease are handled, whether
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  farms escape into the wild.
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  Now, there are some ways that, aquaculture's not being done to the
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  best of its ability, and there are a lot of people who are very emotional about
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  how it's being, rolled out, how it's being enforced, all that kind of stuff.
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  And so I get, some of the, consequences to that and how people look at that.
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  But the quick way to tell is, you wanna look for Aquaculture Stewardship
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  Council, the ASC, that kind of label, just like the Marine Stewardship Council.
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  Best aquaculture practices, BAP, is less strict and still a lot
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  better than nothing, though, seafood guides rate farm products, too.
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  So the Seafood Watch, your Marine Stewardship Council,
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  OceanWise, app, those all work.
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  Now, one rule of thumb that works for farmed and wild seafood is doing it
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  right costs more, producers who do it right tell you about it loudly, like,
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  because it lets them charge more.
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  And if the package is vague about where and how something was
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  produced, that's usually a sign.
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  It's usually, like, right then and there because it's a higher price,
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  so they wanna make sure that you know exactly where it comes from.
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  Here's where I want you to take from this episode, The next time your government
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  proposes a protected area or reviews the rules of an existing one, submit
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  that comment during public consultation.
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  It doesn't matter if you're a fisher or you live near the ocean,
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  or you know anything about marine science or marine conservation.
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  You don't have to be a marine biologist to have this public comment.
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  It's for everybody.
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  It's for public.
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  Whether you live in the country or even outside the country in a lot
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  of places, you can have your say.
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  If you care about the ocean, you care about how things are done, and you
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  want things done right, 'cause when they're done right, they work, well,
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  let's get them done right, keep it simple when you do your public support.
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  Say you support the protected area and ask that the rules keep bottom
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  trawling and other destructive gear out of any kind of sensitive habitats.
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  Most countries post these consultations on their fisheries and environment
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  agency website, so sign up for those alerts from those websites or follow a
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  local ocean group like Oceana Canada, if you're in Canada, or any, Oceana
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  wherever you live, they'll track them, and they'll kinda help you with that.
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  Now, the difference between like a paper park and a real one is essentially
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  how the rules are enforced and the rules that are within it, right?
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  Rules get written in consultations, and then consultations count the comments.
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  So it's an important thing to know that when you go to this public comments, that,
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  that's a significant part of this process.
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  Now, that's the end of our episode, We've been covering all the harms and the fixes
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  to make sure our seafood's sustainable.
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  So, next time if it's you at the seafood counter, we're
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  gonna talk about that tomorrow.
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  Labels, the apps, and how those choices actually change what's in the ocean.
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  We're gonna talk about that tomorrow 'cause it's really, really important.
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  But kind of thing I wanna leave you with here is, like, I want you to
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  understand, like, the Hag Frass, like this sensitive marine protected area.
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  Hundred kilometers off Cornwall, pink sea fans sway in the current,
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  and a jewel anemone opens.
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  No chain has come across this reef since 2024.
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  It's developed, it's established, and it brings habitat for so many other
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  fish species that allows fisheries to continue and be sustainable.
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  It's such an important part of conservation.
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  You protect the right places, write the right rules, and
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  the sea floor will grow back.
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  Place by place, the ocean and the dinner table can win.
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  They can both win.
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  That's an important aspect to remember for this episode.
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  If you are listening to this on an app or a platform where it allows
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  comments, please reach out to me.
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  I'd love to hear what you think of the episode or if you have any questions.
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  And of course, if you are listening to this on your favorite podcast app audio
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  only, I would love to hear from you.
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  My socials are in the show notes.
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  Hit me up.
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  Thank you so much for listening.
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  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
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  This has been another episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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  Have a great day.
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  We'll talk to you tomorrow, and happy conservation.