The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales

Author:Helen Scales
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472966872
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

In addition to orange roughy and slender armourhead a menagerie of unusual fish has been extracted from the deep sea by industrial trawlers. Greenland halibut is a giant, metre-long flatfish with an eye on its forehead and an unusual habit of swimming upright, giving it forward-facing, cyclopean vision. Blue ling is a slender cousin of cod, and longnose velvet dogfish does indeed have a long nose and dark, velvety-looking skin, as well as elliptical eyes and a distrusting look. There are splendid alfonsinos and blackbelly rosefish, longfin codling and Patagonian toothfish, whiptails and rattails, slickheads and oreos.

Not all are as long-lived or vulnerable to overfishing as orange roughy. In particular, species from the cod family are generally in better shape, having evolved first in shallower seas then moved deeper, bringing with them faster growth rates and greater resilience to fishing. Some, though, are doing far worse. Roundnose grenadier, with its firm, tasty flesh, has been a favourite on restaurant menus in France and is highly endangered. So too is the gulper shark, with its mesmerising emerald eyes. This deep-sea shark species is targeted not for food but for the squalene in its oily liver, a chemical that goes into making cosmetics, vaccines and haemorrhoid creams.

Over the decades, the expanding footprint of deep trawlers has gone truly global, extending to the shelf edges off every continent except Antarctica.14 In every ocean, seamounts are trawled.

Scouring so much of the deep with their enormous nets suggests trawlers must gather enough fish to feed the world. The most recent figures, including estimates of illegal and unreported catches, show that is far from true. In total, over the past sixty-five years, the global catch of deep-living fish has been just shy of 25 million tonnes. Compared to the volume of fish caught throughout the oceans in that time – closer to 5.2 billion tonnes – the deep has provided less than half of one percent.15

The economic value of these deep fish is equally unimpressive, especially considering that many countries deliberately encourage deep-sea trawling with financial handouts. Fishing is one of the primary industries that many countries seem reluctant to let go of; jobs are at stake, and to some extent food security, but chiefly prevailing are powerful lobbies and a stubborn nostalgia for an activity that humankind has been doing in one form or another for millennia. As such, governments find ways of keeping fishing industries afloat. Government subsidies to keep deep-trawling fleets operating range from boatbuilding and buyback to port construction and renovations, tax exemptions and most significantly, fuel subsidies. With their long ranges and powerful engines, deep-sea trawlers rack up massive fuel costs. Every deep-sea fishing country, with the notable exception of New Zealand, foots a portion of that bill by providing a discount on diesel fuel. The most generous is Japan, giving twenty-five US cents on the litre, followed by Australia (twenty cents) and then Russia, South Korea and Iceland (all nineteen cents).16

Each year, the global fleet of deep-water trawlers lands a catch worth an estimated US$601 million.

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