The effects of bottom trawling
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Transcript
- Papakura High
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Does bottom trawling affect the whale’s habitat?
- Jo McVeaigh
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Absolutely. If you don't know what bottom trawling is, it’s a fishing technique where huge nets are dragged across the sea floor. This is done so that the nets will catch all the fish, but at the same time the nets are dragged across the floor, they are crushing all the coral and they are crushing the sea habitat. So this means that, not only are those nets catching fish, they are also catching coral and rocks and they are basically destroying the habitat where the fish live. So this is having some terrible consequences on our sea floor and our oceans. It is depleting these fish species, so that some of these deep sea species, like orange roughy, have had huge population declines, but also it destroys the sea floor where the fish live. So the way that it affects whales is, whales often feed at these deep depths. Scientists have found change in the stomach contents of whales, because of the depletion of some of these fish populations. By changing the composition of fish in the ecosystem, the effect is that it’s changing the diets in whales.