Bottom Trawling on Seamounts: The Damage Nobody Sees

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Is there something in your life that
really made you or really inspired you to

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do something that you're doing right now?

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It could be to listen to this podcast.

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It could be to advocate for
something to protect the ocean.

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Yesterday, we covered the story of Matthew
Gianni, who I'm gonna be interviewing.

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We're gonna be publishing the
interview I did with him this Friday.

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And we talked about his story from
fisherman, like deep-sea trawling

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fisherman, and a bunch of other types
of fisher, but really deep-sea trawling

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fisherman, and led to him managing
the ocean program for Greenpeace

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International, as well as co-founding
the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

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And during that time, he started off
with his advocacy role really started

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off with him looking at what the damage
he was causing, him and his crew were

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causing as they were deep-sea fishing,
deep-sea trawling off the coast, off the

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central coast of California, you know,
1,000 meters down, 3,000 feet down.

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And it led him to eventually co-founding
a Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

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Huge, huge path to really inspire.

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But what really made him kind of pull
the trigger or led to him pulling the

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trigger were the studies that we're
talking about today, or at least

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part one study and then an update
of that study later on in his life.

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And that really solidified
his knowledge on what deep-sea

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trawling has and had at the time.

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This is around late 1990s, early 2000s.

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So we're gonna be talking about
deep-sea trawling on seamounts.

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We're gonna talk about what seamounts
are, we're gonna start all that, and

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then we're gonna talk about what the
study found and what it means about

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what the study found, and how it
really got Matthew to really pull that

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trigger and start an organization, a
coalition of over 80 organizations that

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have helped put in rules and policies
and have a moratorium in the UN on

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deep-sea trawling in the high seas.

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So we're gonna talk all about
that on today's episode of the

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How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

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Your source for ocean news, conservation,
and science, Monday to Friday.

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I think we're probably the
podcast that publishes the

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most, but it's here for you.

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It's here for you to soak up.

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It's here for you to be inspired by
and to lead to better protection of

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the ocean through your daily life.

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So if you want to follow that kind
of stuff, hit that follow button

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on your, favorite podcast app,
and you can do so, right away.

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All right, so let's first
talk about what seamounts are

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and why they actually matter.

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So essentially, they're
underwater mountains.

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Like, they rise at least 1,000
meters above the surrounding seafloor

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without breaking the surface.

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So these are underwater mountains.

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Most are volcanic in origin.

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Now, the seamount disrupt ocean currents
by a process called topographic upwelling.

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Basically, with their mountain, they
have this side of the mountain, and

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that water from the bottom comes
up, it's get pulled up, and it

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pulls cold, nutrient-rich water up
from the depths toward the surface.

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It's called upwelling,
topographic upwelling.

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That upwelling fuels the blooms
of phytoplankton, which feed the

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rest of the food web in that area
near the, closer to the surface.

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So you have small fish, then bigger
fish, then sharks, then tuna, then

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seabirds, and marine mammals that
gather around the seamounts to feed.

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It's actually quite an interesting area.

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When you talk about marine protected
areas, these are distinctive areas

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that get protected because they
are found in these areas, and

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they attract such biodiversity.

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Now, their rocky surfaces on the top of
the seamounts give slow-growing stationary

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animals like corals and sponges a hard
place to attach and grow, something

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rare in the deep-sea soft sediment.

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So normally it's like a sandy bottom,
but now, you have this rocky surface

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'cause it's a mountain, and there's
all these, like, grooves and stuff

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that these slow-growing animals can
grow on, like corals and sponges.

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Now, on average, roughly one in five
species found on seamounts are endemic.

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They don't exist anywhere on Earth.

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They only exist there.

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Some marine scientists call
them oasis in the deep sea.

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It's part of the ocean where
it's otherwise cold, dark, and

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largely empty, and a seamount
is where life is concentrated.

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I think it's kind of interesting
to, like, paint that picture.

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Like, think about just complete
darkness, ' cause that, you know, there's

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no light that gets down 3,000 feet.

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It's complete darkness.

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You have all this rocky bottom, but
this, like, mountain that comes out, this

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seamount that comes out of the bottom,
and there's all this life around it.

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You know, there's probably
sharks moving around, there's

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coral sponges, schools of fish.

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That's what happens before
any damage happens to it.

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That's what happens just
as a natural environment.

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This is how these systems kinda grow.

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It starts off with corals and sponges
and other animals that form the habitat.

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Then all these fish and invertebrates
and bigger fish like sharks

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and tuna kinda come around and
they feed off of the areas.

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It's a really cool place to be.

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Now, humans interact with the
ocean in ways that help and ways

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that harm often at the same time
through the same industries, right?

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Sometimes it's not necessarily
that they're benefiting the ocean,

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but the ocean is benefiting us.

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So commercial fishing feeds billions
of people and supports coastal

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communities worldwide, including around
seamounts, which have historically

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been productive fishing grounds
for species like orange roughy.

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Now, but the same industry that feeds
people can also, when practiced certain

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ways, cause damage that can outlast
the benefit by decades or longer.

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So bottom trawling is
one of those practices.

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It involves, like, dragging those nets.

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I talked about this in yesterday's episode
with Matthew, dragging in heavy nets and

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gear along the ocean floor to catch fish.

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And on a seamount, that gear
drags directly across corals

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and sponge habitat that took
centuries or even longer to grow.

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So think about you found, like,
these fishers found this habitat.

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They're like, " We want to fish here
because it's important for us because

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it feeds, coastal areas and , it allows
us to feed our families and so forth."

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But as we fish and we bottom trawl to
get those, we destroy all the habitat

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that's taken, like, centuries to build.

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Like, centuries to build, Now, I don't
want to say that it's fishing that's the

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problem because, you know, fishing isn't
inherently destructive and most fishers

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are trying not to destroy anything.

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They want to sustainably fish for a
long time, generations and generations.

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The point here is that, like, even though,
like, this practice, it could be legal,

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common, and economically important, it
can still cause a lot of damage that

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isn't visible from the surface of the,
like, of a deck of a boat because they

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can't see what damage they're causing.

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Unlike the damage on land when-- like,
which people can often see directly.

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So if somebody goes through, like,
with their truck and starts spinning

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around on a field, you see the
damage that can happen to that field.

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When you put-- Like, damage on the deep
sea floor happens, like no one sees it.

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These seamounts sit around 1,000 meters
down, like below the sea surface.

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So it's far beyond any
recreational diver can go.

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Like I'm on open water.

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I'm legally allowed or
certified to go 100 feet down.

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Like 100 feet.

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So imagine what 1,000 meters, nobody's
going down there unless you're going

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in an ROV, or go down in a sub, which
some people do, or they take ROVs down.

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But it's beyond the
recreational diving range.

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It's beyond the sunlight.

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It's beyond casual
observation of any kind.

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So a trawler can drag its nets across
the same seamount hundreds and thousands

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of times over the years, and from
the deck, nothing looks different.

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It just looks like the
surface of the water.

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And the evidence of destruction
just stays down at the bottom.

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Nobody knows what's happened.

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And sometimes you don't even
know that it's been fished.

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Without a scientific survey, like
specifically designed to go down and look,

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there's no way to know what has been lost.

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And like anything was lost, if
anything is lost at all, like

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that's where we're looking at here.

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The destruction doesn't have to be open,
but it's just nobody knows this happens.

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We can't see it.

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You know, it goes back to that
image I shared on Ocean Decoded

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Live last week, and I, I had the
cartoon, like, redrawn using AI

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because I couldn't find the cartoon.

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But essentially there's two
people on a deserted island.

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They're looking out on the ocean,
at the surface of the ocean.

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They're like, "There's nothing here.
We have nothing to feed us. There's

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nothing here." But underneath the surface
are all these animals, like, looking

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up, like, looking teeming with life.

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Well, same thing, like, we don't
know what's happening on a seamount.

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So I just want you to think about that.

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You have the seamount that is all
this, like, teeming with life, teeming

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with biodiversity that could help
feed with animals and larvae and

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everything like that, other places,
other seamounts, or other habitats

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get destroyed over years of trawling.

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Now, there was a study that started in
1997, the team Australian researchers led

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by Tony Koslow and Karen Gallet Holmes
from the CSIRO, Marine Research in Hobart.

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They surveyed a group of small
seamounts south of Tasmania

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using dredges and cameras.

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So they started to look
at these seamounts.

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They didn't know how
much fishing was going.

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They had an idea of where things were
being fished, but they didn't know

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exactly, like, any damage caused, right?

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That's what they wanted to find.

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Their goal was to assess the impact
of trawling for a fish called orange

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roughy, and to test whether the proposed
marine reserve that was gonna go in there

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would actually work to protect the area.

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So they surveyed 14 seamounts, both inside
and outside in an interim protected area,

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deliberately choosing sites ranging from
completely unfished to heavily fished.

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So they're gonna see what the damage
is on these areas and what, like,

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what happens when you fish on an
area heavily and when you don't

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fish at all, and then in the middle.

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That gave researchers, like, something
rare in ocean science, a way to compare

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seamounts that had experienced years of
trawling against ones that had, like,

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essentially been left alone, right?

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Similar starting conditions,
one variable difference.

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So like, like this is the hypo-
this is how science works.

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I'm taking you into the mind of a
scientist looking and saying, "Hey,

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there's a lot of fishing going on
in these areas, and there's a lot of

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seamounts around. Let's start taking
a look at what the damage is on these

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heavily fished areas, and if there is,
like, is it causing that much damage?"

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This orange roughy is probably a
commercially important species.

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It feeds a lot of people, it
feeds a lot of industries.

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So how do we make sure that we are
doing this properly, sustainably,

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and making sure that we're
not damaging the whole thing?

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And maybe they won't be able to fish
orange roughy after they've destroyed

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all these habitats as they move from
seamount to seamount to seamount.

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So here's what the researchers found.

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The diversity itself was
a discovery in its own.

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That single 1997 survey that they did
turned up 262 invertebrate species and 37

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species, compared to only 598 invertebrate
species reported from every seamount

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study conducted worldwide before 1987.

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So one survey nearly matched
decades of prior global research.

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Now, on the untrawled and lightly
fished seamounts, the restructure

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was dense, diverse, and beautiful.

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It was all alive.

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On the other hand, the heavily trawled
seamounts included two named Main, Pedra

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and Sister, those are the seamounts,
told a completely different story.

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Their reef aggregate was almost stripped
from the slopes, or reduced to rubble.

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Benthic biomass on heavily fished
seamounts was 83% lower than the lightly

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fished ones or unfished ones, and there
were 59% fewer species per sample.

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That's a huge difference.

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A follow-up study published in 2009
by Althaus and colleagues went even

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further analyzing over 64,000 video
frames across 25 seamounts, not 14,

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and more than 700 high-resolution
images across seven seamounts.

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I assume that's within the 25 seamounts.

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It found trawling had reduced coral
cover by roughly two orders of

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magnitude, close to a hundredfold,
and it caused threefold declines in

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richness, diversity, and density across
the rest of the seafloor community.

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I guess, incredible difference.

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Like perhaps the most sobering
finding came from the 2009 study.

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On seamounts where trawling had already
stopped five years earlier, there

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was a no clear sign of recovery.

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So once the damage was done, it
didn't come back in five years, right?

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It wasn't just severe.

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These things, like appeared to be
effectively permanent, at least on any

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timescale that mattered to human life.

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So if you go back to what I mentioned
at the beginning, these seamounts

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have taken centuries to build this
coral and sponge cover and all

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these different habitat covers.

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It's not a system that is
wonderfully beautiful and light.

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It is a dark system, like no light.

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There's a lot of currents and everything
like that going across, and these animals

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are extremely slow-growing and sensitive.

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And so as these animals grow, and
takes like centuries to create,

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and gone within moments of a trawl
or a number of different trawls,

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we can't expect that the fish are
gonna come back within five years.

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It just doesn't work that way.

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The deep sea is different.

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The species are different.

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They grow slower.

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They don't have the same mechanisms as
the species at the surface especially

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corals and sponges, that are able to grow
with sunlight because of their symbionts.

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They grow different ways,
and they grow slower.

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You are seeing how destruction at such
a level, whether it's just moments,

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how the recovery takes so long.

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I want you to think about that as you
start thinking about pressures on the

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deep sea, trawling, deep-sea mining.

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Just imagine having video of this area.

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Like I watch Nautilus Live,
like it's a cool program.

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They go to sea, and they have like
educational things, and these are the

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ones where you see these ROVs go down,
and you see like people on, their voices

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on the camera be like, "Oh, look at that.

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"It's a dumbo octopus." Or you see
all these others, like, "There's

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a rockfish here," or something.

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And they really enjoy
seeing what they see.

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Imagine being a researcher.

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You're going down with an ROV, and
you're watching this, and you

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see these images of just rubble.

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It's gotta be heartbreaking when
you see seamounts that are just

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teeming with life, and then you
go to ones that are just rubble.

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And five years later, you go
back, and nothing came back.

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Nothing.

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You know, seamounts often carry
relatively high levels of endemism.

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That means, species that exist only
on that seamount and nowhere else.

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So if that seamount is trawled that
heavily, for anyone has ever surveyed

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like what lived there, there's no way to
know what existed or what didn't, right?

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So not only are we losing habitat,
but we're losing species that

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could help us as humans or
just help the system in general.

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A well-known deep sea biologist
made this point plainly, saying

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that we may be losing species on
seamounts from bottom trawling that

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we haven't even discovered yet.

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It's not only about the damage anymore.

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It raised the possibility of
undiscovered extinctions, species erased

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before science ever even knew them.

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Like, that is the huge
gut punch of all of this.

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It's not just habitat loss, it's the
fact that we are losing entire species

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before we even knew they were there.

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And a lot of you are like, "Well, we
didn't know them, so, you know, no harm,

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no foul." But these species could be
pivotal in like the Earth's future, could

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be pivotal in understanding how these
species are only found in certain spots

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around the world on these seamounts.

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It's just absence.

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We don't know what they are.

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We don't know what they were.

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They're just gone, and it's
just because of our destruction.

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This is the study that got Matthew
Gianni, who was a deep sea fisherman,

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to say, " This can't happen anymore.

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We need to protect these seamounts.

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We need to protect the deep sea.

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We need to really understand the
impact of fishing without knowing

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what we are destroying or that
we're even destroying." 'Cause some

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people may have just said, "Well,
yeah, we're not destroying anything.

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It's just fine.

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We keep going back, and we keep
getting fish." But for how long?

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And what's the recovery?

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I can understand if you're gonna
deep sea trawl one little area,

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and then it can recover quickly
because it's near the surface.

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But if we know now that after five
years we're not seeing any recovery in

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the deep sea, is it really worth going
back and fishing again until we destroy

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everything and we lose everything on
that seamount or multiple seamounts?

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And I want you to say, like,
think about the same thing when

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it comes to deep sea mining.

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' Cause there are studies that show that
there was major impact in deep sea

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mining, and it didn't recover four
years, three or four years later.

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I'm starting to see, like, a trend here.

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I'm not saying it's scientific, and
I'm not saying it's real, but it's

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starting to sound like things in the
deep sea don't recover as quickly

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as some of the other habitats that
we've seen in the shallower waters.

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So something for you to think about.

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This story inspired Matthew to co-found
the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition and

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work with the UN General Assembly and
the FAO and a number of other bodies

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to put in international moratorium
on deep sea fishing in the high seas.

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This is what inspired the change.

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These two studies, and his history
with deep sea fishing and trawling.

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That's what gets people
to do amazing things.

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And that's what Matthew did.

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And these studies that show, like,
some crazy emotional changes, right?

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Some physical changes, and emotional
for us to see, wow, we're actually

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doing a lot of damage for what, right?

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Is it really worth it?

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And it needs to be managed a lot better.

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A lot better.

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But that's the episode for today.

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I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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You can contact me.

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00:15:48,309 --> 00:15:50,206
If you're on Spotify, give me a comment.

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00:15:50,226 --> 00:15:51,906
Love to hear your
thoughts on this episode.

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00:15:52,106 --> 00:15:54,766
Also, my socials are in the show
notes, so you can just DM me

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00:15:54,766 --> 00:15:57,756
on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook,
wherever you'd like to contact me.

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00:15:57,876 --> 00:15:59,876
Also on YouTube, do Ocean Decoded live.

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00:15:59,876 --> 00:16:03,073
Just started this show Monday to
Thursday live at 4:00 PM Eastern.

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00:16:03,073 --> 00:16:03,453
Check it out.

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00:16:03,453 --> 00:16:05,563
We cover all different
things around the ocean.

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All right?

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00:16:06,333 --> 00:16:09,623
So I wanna thank you so much for
joining me on today's episode of the

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How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

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I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.

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Have a great day.

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00:16:12,696 --> 00:16:14,736
We'll talk to you next time,
and happy conservation.