Treat of Bottom Trawling

Threat of Bottom Trawling

      “Blobfish” you may or may not be familiar with this name of fish. Although this fish inhibits deep water and is not used for food sources, it becomes an endangered species because of trawling activities (“World’s Strangest Fish To Become Instinct,” 2010, p.1). Beside Blobfish, there are thousands of species that are killed and die out due to bottom trawling, and finally they become extinct. While bottom trawling has some advantages of providing sufficient food sources to human, its negative impact on marine species far outweigh advantages. Thus, bottom trawling should be banned because it destroys the marine ecosystem by damaging species living on the seafloor and natural habitats, because it causes economic loss in terms of overfishing and bycatch, and because it has a negative influence on poverty reduction.

      Perhaps the main reason about bottom trawling by arguing is that it destroys marine ecosystems, damaging natural habitats and marine species. In general, bottom trawling is a destructive fishing method because it drags equipment across the seafloor in order to catch a large amount of fish or marine animals. Thus, the damage of its impact on the seafloor is significantly huge from reducing biodiversity of marine species to flattening complexity of natural habitats. For example, the ScienceDaily reported that a number of places have banned bottom trawling, due to scientific results proving that serious trawling activities diminish the biodiversity of marine species by killing corals, sponges, fishes, and other species living in or on the seafloor (“Bottom Trawling Impacts On Ocean,” 2008, p.1). Moreover, bottom trawling usually targets the place inhibited by more than 98 percent of marine animals (Thurman &Burton, 2001; cited in cited in Morgan, Norse, Rogers, Haedrich, & Maxwell, 2005, p.5). In other words, bottom trawling not only reduces the number of marine species, but also flattens natural habitats by dragging...