Save Our Oceans

Today's exploitative fishing practices exceed nature's ability to replenish the ocean's fish stocks. According to the United Nations, 71-78% of the world's fisheries are 'fully exploited', 'over exploited' or significantly depleted'. Some species have already been fished to commercial extinction. More are on the verge of extinction.

Fishing does not only threaten the fish species we target for food. Other species - such as marine mammals and seabirds - are caught incidentally in fishing gear and killed. Moreover, the fishing practices are destructive. Bottom trawling, for example, is a destructive way of 'strip mining' the ocean surface, harvesting the species that live there. It can destroy entire habitats found on the ocean floor.

The impacts are felt throughout the marine ecosystems. Scientists are already warning that the oceans will suffer profound changes as a result of overfishing and destructive fishing practices. Most fishing gear is not selective. This means that as well as the 'target' species of fish it catches, any number of 'non-target' species may also be hauled in. This 'incidental' catch of other species is referred to as 'bycatch'. Globally, it is estimated that almost a quarter of what is caught is merely killed and discarded.

Bycatch is not limited to unwanted fish species. All types of marine life including whales, dolphins, porpoises, fur seals, albatrosses and turtles are killed as bycatch. For example, a staggering 100 million sharks are killed each year. Tuna fisheries, which in the past had high dolphin bycatch levels, are still responsible for the deaths of 1 million sharks. The cost of bycatch to the ocean ecosystems is immense. And fisheries with substantial levels of bycatch are clearly neither acceptable nor sustainable.

Around the UK, the most significant example of bycatch is that of small cetaceans (dolphins and porpoises) in fishing nets. Harbour porpoises are particularly at risk from static 'bottom-set' trawling, whereas dolphins are most at risk from huge trawled nets because they feed on the same small fish as the target species. Evidence of the growing scale of this problem is washed up on beaches around the south west of England and northern France every year in the form of hundreds of dolphin corpses.