- It was in the murky waters of the North Sea that scientists
first realised something had gone terribly wrong with our marine environment.
In one of the most inhospitable sites under British sovereignty, they discovered
magnificent coral blooms three times the height of a man and of a type
previously unknown to science.
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- What followed was even more startling. Acoustic surveys
revealed a series of mysterious wounds across the extraordinary formations.
Eventually a culprit was identified: they had been gouged by deep-sea fishing
equipment. Even here, beneath hundreds of feet of water, man had made his
mark.
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- Having emptied Britain's shallow coastal strip of its
once bountiful fish stocks, fishermen are now wrecking our last virgin
territory: the sea bed.
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- Our seas have been stripped of fish and now the seabed
is reduced to a featureless desert of sand and mud by massive dredgers
hunting a dwindling prey.
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- This week the government will be offered its starkest
warning yet of the consequences of permitting the continued farming of
the sea to go unchecked. An 18-month investigation by the Royal Commission
on Environmental Pollution will demand that 30 per cent of the waters around
Britain be designated 'marine national parks'. It is a desperate plea from
a leading authority, a final warning to an island with a proud seafaring
tradition that it risks being surrounded by a lifeless sea.
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- Only by preventing trawlers from entering thousands of
square miles of sea by the introduction of 'no-take zones', where fishermen
are banned from taking depleted stocks, can the trend be arrested, conclude
experts.
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- Professor Sir Tom Blundell, the biochemist who advises
Tony Blair and Parliament on environmental issues, has led the inquiry
and has been startled by the evidence charting the decline of the nation's
seas. He has found that there is practically nowhere in UK territorial
waters which has not been savaged by boats now desperate to track down
remaining fish stocks.
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- Of chief concern are the massive factory trawlers that
indiscriminately drag gigantic chains, weighing up to 10 tonnes, across
seabeds, a 'continuous battering' that is destroying a pristine resource.
The trouble is that the seabed cannot be seen, which explains why damaging
fishing practices have been allowed to continue for so long.
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- Only now is the true extent of the desecration of Britain's
marine ecosystems coming to light, a point that will be hammered home on
Tuesday when Blundell's work is unveiled amid his warnings that the UK's
offshore environment stands at a critical point in history.
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- 'Technological advances and economic pressures are leading
to an intensification which has the potential to wreak as much damage on
the oceans as intensive agriculture has on land over recent decades,' he
said. Some conservationists already fear the damage may be irreversible,
claiming that successive governments failed to resolve the balance between
allowing a fishing industry to prosper and its obligation to future generations.
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- A perfect example of the desecration of Britain's deep
water is provided by the extraordinary coral growths of the Darwin Mounds
off the northwest coast of Scotland which provide a thriving home to fish
like the orange roughy in a bleak, cold world. Then news reached Blundell's
commission of the deep grooves etched into the 8,000-year-old coral. Orange
roughy - which have only recently been fished in numbers - are being frantically
scooped up by boats running out of species to catch. The ravaging of the
Darwin Mounds has served as a wake-up call for environmentalists and has
been the inspiration for the report.
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- A separate report, published tomorrow, will warn that
the destruction of precious reefs is not just a domestic phenomenon. A
definitive analysis by 240 international experts of the planet's coral
reefs will reveal that two-thirds are now severely damaged, a fifth so
profoundly that they are unlikely to recover. Some have been bleached to
death as sea temperatures warm in the wake of the global warming, Others
have suffered the same fate as the Darwin Mounds.
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- But few places in the world can match the North Sea for
the intensity of its fishing. Last week scientists at the Plymouth Marine
Laboratory deduced that 90 per cent of the North Sea's floor is trawled
at least once a year, in some places up to six times. Dr Jean-Luc Solandt,
biodiversity policy officer of the Marine Conservation Society, which gave
evidence to Blundell's investigation, warns that Britain has reached a
point where the 'complete cessation of the population' of certain species
in some areas had arrived.
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- What will happen in the next fear decades is uncertain,
however. 'It's difficult to conceive how the effects of this fishing will
take place,' said Solandt. 'Evidence suggests there is a real problem,
but we are not exactly sure what is going on, or what is going on at the
bottom of the sea. Neither do we know precisely how fish are being caught
and then thrown overboard.'
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- The problem of 'by-catching' - where creatures are caught
accidentally in the massive nets and tossed away - threatens key species
such as the bottlenose dolphin. The Wildlife Trusts, a nationwide network
of local charities, believes that the species could be wiped out within
a decade. Last month figures claimed up to 10,000 dolphins and their close
cousins, porpoises, are killed in the North Atlantic each year as 'by-catch'.
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- Even species such as swordfish which are found on the
shelves of supermarkets are often from those deemed 'outside safe biological
limits'. A study by the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit into the profitability
of the fishing sector found that half the fish landed under quota in the
UK are from stocks that are either unsustainable or borderline.
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- Mainly because of its starring role in the national dish
of fish and chips, cod has consistently been held up as the symbol of such
decline. An adult cod should be expected to live for 40 years, but government
advisers have found that just 0.5 per cent of the cod population is aged
above five. Nine out of ten are less than two years old, suggesting that
the cod's breeding pattern cycle has collapsed.
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- Concern was reaffirmed last month when the International
Council for the Exploration of the Sea, a group of marine scientists who
specialise in the North Atlantic, released its annual survey of fish stocks.
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- To sustain a population of North Sea cod, it recommended
that there should be no fewer than 150,000 tonnes of the fish; the current
total is 46,000 tonnes. The WWF believes cod could disappear within 15
years. Conservationists now increasingly refer to Britain's seas in the
context of the Grand Banks fishing grounds off Newfoundland in Canada,
once the most plentiful cod grounds that the world has known. Relentless
over-fishing soon meant that its seemingly infinite supplies were exhausted
in a few decades.
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- For many experts, over-fishing crystallises the complexities
between balancing economic competitiveness and the needs of nature. Fishing
leaders are the first to acknowledge that they cannot expect to feed their
families if there is nothing to catch, claiming that until recently they
did not realise they had inadvertently sabotaged their livelihoods.
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- Now the vacuum left by dwindling wild stocks is being
filled by the growth of fish farms, a practice that has transformed salmon
from occasional luxury to often the cheapest fish on offer - although this
week's report is likely to express concerns over its environmental viability.
In particular the fact that disease has spread from farmed fish to their
wild neighbours, threatening the very species they were meant to haul back
from the brink of extinction, worries environmentalists.
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- This week's report by Blundell is intended to form a
vital component of the Blair's promised Marine Bill next year. Excluding
trawlers from vast areas of sea remains, for now, the favoured option,
although Blair must first secure a European consensus.
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- On Wednesday the Royal Commission's findings will be
revealed in Brussels in an attempt to pressurise Britain's maritime neighbours
to halt the 'strip mining' of the Atlantic by massive factory ships.
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- Negotiations will coincide with talks to thwart another
major threat to marine life: climate change. Delegates at crucial international
negotiations in Argentina will discuss measures aimed at keeping temperatures
less than two degrees higher than they stood a century ago, although the
seas are now warming alarmingly. Some believe the brooding North Sea will
even tually resemble the Mediterranean, at least in terms of warmth.
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- However, one ray of hope has appeared. Britain's haddock
stocks have started flourishing amid studies suggesting that they can learn
how to wriggle through fishing nets, with youngsters picking up the knack
from their elders.
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- If Blundell's report fails to induce change, the first
kernel of optimism may have emerged that nature's often extraordinary powers
of recovery could provide the answer.
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- Oil that troubles the waters
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- More than 30,000 tonnes of oil is illegally discharged
into the North Sea every year. An estimated 6,000 oil wells have been drilled
into the seabed over the past 40 years.
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- Around 400,000 tonnes of crude oil is accidentally spilled
every year by supertankers in the North Sea.
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- The Torrey Canyon, carrying 120,000 tonnes of oil, hit
rocks near Land's End in 1967. In 1993 the Braer leaked 85,000 tonnes of
oil off Scotland. Three years later, the Sea Empress crude oil tanker grounded
in the waters off south-west Wales.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,13369,1366886,00.html
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