Corals Nearly as Old as the Pyramids, and the Fight to Save Them

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Somewhere on the ocean floor right now,
there's a coral colony that has already

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been, like, a thousand years old.

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It even been around as the
pyramids were being built.

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It's older than most of recorded human
history, and a single pass of a trawling

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net could wipe it out in seconds.

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And that is the fight that my
interview on Friday, the person

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I'm interviewing on Friday found

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themselves in negotiating
in a windowless UN rooms.

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and it's a fight that is still
being decided this very year.

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So, you know, when we talk about
protecting the bottom of the ocean.

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We talked last week about how there is
room on the bottom, there's lots of life

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on the bottom of the deep sea, whether
it's on a seamount, whether it's in

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the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, there is
life on the bottom, and it's a habitat.

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And rarely do we see habitats on the
list of, like, when a trawl net goes

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through, a bottom trawl net goes through.

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It's not the fish that actually are
bothered, it's the trawl destroys

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the habitat where the fish go.

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I mean, the fish go in, they're obviously
bothered, they get caught, but it's

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really the destruction that is caused
by that trawl, that bottom trawl, that

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actually scrapes the bottom of the ocean.

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And whether it's in the deep sea or
in the shallows, it gets destroyed.

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And so the person that we're interviewing
on Friday, I'm kinda doing a little bit of

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a mystery here, they were part of what we
call, like, the high seas discrete stocks.

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So it's specifically bottom
fishing and bottom trawling.

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And this person was chairing the UN
fisheries negotiations at the time.

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And like I said before, what's actually
being damaged is the habitat, not

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the fish stocks itself necessarily.

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Obviously, they're getting
caught, but it's not as if they

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can be degraded in one pass.

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But the habitat can be destroyed,
and if the habitat is destroyed,

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the fish eventually will go away if
there's enough habitat or there's

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not enough habitat to live in.

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' Cause you gotta remember,
fish need hiding spots.

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They need food.

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They need areas.

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They need a home.

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These habitats provide that home.

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It's rare that you'll see a lot
of bottom-dwelling fish that are

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out in the open 'cause then they
can get caught by predators.

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They don't want that.

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They wanna make sure that they
can actually be protected, and

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they can hide, and they can do
what they need to do to survive.

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So we have to protect the bottom.

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We have to protect the habitats.

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And I think, when you start to look
at a lot of these corals that have

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been growing for centuries, and some
of them are thousands of years old.

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Like, some of them have been dated, like,
4,270 years old off the coast of Hawaii.

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These are Leiopathes species, right?

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I think that's how you
pronounce it, Leopathes species.

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basically deep-water black coral.

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And so the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory researchers

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dated those 4,270 years old.

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It's one of the oldest
living skeleton-building

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marine organisms we know.

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This is an organism that builds
its corals as it grows up.

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It takes a while to grow, but it has this
intricate, like, habitat-forming ability.

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Now, just a comparison when people
say it's as almost as old as pyramids.

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The Great Pyramid of Giza is
roughly 4,500 years old, so it's

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just about 250 years shy of that.

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So it's a little bit younger, not
older, but it's still important.

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And that same research body that
actually did the black coral aging,

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they said that bottom trawling,
commercial bottom trawling, is the

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direct threat to these corals, alongside
of, like, harvesting for jewelry and

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things like that for these corals.

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So, you can't just smash
through this stuff.

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You have to be careful.

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You have to have rules so that you can
sit there and enjoy the fruits of the

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labor of these habitat-forming corals.

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So as the problem that is at hand
is that you have these slow-growing,

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thousand-year-old corals that need to
be protected because we need to protect

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the fish, the longevity of the fish.

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You want a sustainable fishery,
you have to protect the habitats

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that can house the fish.

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Pretty simple.

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It's not difficult to
understand that concept.

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Now, there has to be some kind of
response to say, "Hey, we need to

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protect this." So, there was a landmark
international agreement negotiated by

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the person I'm talking to on Friday, who
was chairing the UN fisheries talks to

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mitigate the impact of bottom fishing and
bottom trawling on vulnerable seabeds.

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They call it a step function
change in how the type of fishery

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is managed internationally.

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And so I think this was the UN General
Assembly Resolution 61/108 in 2006, right?

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It's a landmark resolution that first
called on states, and you have these

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regional management organizations,
regional fisheries management

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organizations, which are these large
organizational areas, management

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organizations that are managed by
a number of different countries.

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Like, it depends on where they are.

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They're all over the world, though.

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They cover most of the world.

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And so they protect vulnerable ecosystems
like seamounts, hydrothermal vents,

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cold water corals, anything of that
nature from destructive bottom fishing.

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And it's by conducting impact assessments
and closing high seas areas where

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these vulnerable marine ecosystems
are known or likely to occur unless

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proper safeguards are in place.

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So I think it's a landmark policy
'cause it took probably about 13

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years of the State Department's Office
of Marine Conservation that engaged

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in these fisheries negotiations
regionally in the Pacific and globally

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at the United Nations and FAO.

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And, um, you know, there's a
co-authored paper, like a law

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review piece specifically on the
UN fish stocks agreement review

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process, all that kind of stuff.

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So there's a lot of documentation on this.

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And the negotiation that happened
to create this protection and to

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make sure that an impact assessment
has to be done in areas that we

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just don't know what's happening.

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It doesn't always happen cleanly.

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It doesn't always happen in the first try.

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It doesn't say that, " Hey,"
you know, when I explained it

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earlier, I said it's pretty simple.

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You have these thousand-year-old corals
that form this habitat to protect fish.

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Without this habitat, there isn't
gonna be any fish in that area.

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They'll go somewhere else or
they'll be caught really quickly.

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So you have fisheries, bottom trawls,
that come down and scrape the bottom

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and destroy parts of the habitat, you
get less fish 'cause there's not as much

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habitat, or if there's habitat at all.

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And those fish don't always come
back ' cause the corals take

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a long time to grow down there.

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But if you say that to a policy, you
say it to a bunch of countries, well,

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they're just like, " The people in
our country need to fish that area

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because they depend on it for fisheries.

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Their lives depend on it.

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Their livelihoods depend on it.

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Their kids depend on it.

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Their families depend on it.

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They're gonna continue to fish." So
we are advocating for those people.

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We are making sure that we can get, not
only advocating for the people, but of

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course the countries get money from this.

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It's a big part of
their GDP in some cases.

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So the policy doesn't happen just clean,
like, "Hey, we need to protect this area.

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Yes, I agree.

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That's how it's gonna happen.

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Let's protect it." No, it
doesn't happen that way.

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I'm gonna talk a little bit
about the drama that happened.

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In November 2004, the UN General Assembly
rejected an earlier push for an outright

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moratorium on high seas bottom trawling.

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And just like last week when we
talked to Matthew Gianni, the Deep

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Sea Conservation Coalition, which
he's part of and co-founded, led

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the campaign for a temporary ban.

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Opposition led by Iceland and the EU,
particularly Spain, defeated that ban

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and responsibility for high seas bottom
trawl of fishing was left to individual

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nations and regional bodies instead.

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So it didn't really help, you know,
that first pass didn't really help.

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Then two years later in 2006, the
compromise that did pass was Resolution

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61/105 Not a ban necessarily.

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Again, it doesn't always happen the way
we want, but a requirement for an impact

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assessment and area closures, right?

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This is like the step function change
that the person of the subject of

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Friday's interview was talking about.

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It's where you get what you can get.

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You can get something in
there that everybody agrees

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to as the base of this policy.

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It's a real-world example of everything
that happens in conservation.

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It's never the perfect scenario
because some countries or one

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country or two countries or 10
countries want something different.

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And when it comes to fishing, countries
have a long culture in fishing, and

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they wanna keep going to seeing what
they're doing 'cause nobody's ever

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told them to stop before, right?

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So successful international policy is
often the strong but imperfect deal that

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keeps everyone in the tent, so everyone in
the area, not the ideal income that we all

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expect that advocates originally wanted.

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It's never that.

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Now, the story doesn't end in
2006 for this document, for

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this regulation, this policy.

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The UN has kept reviewing the
implementation on a roughly

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recurring cycle, every so often.

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So, uh, in 2009, it sharpened
the impact assessment and

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stock assessment requirements.

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In 2011, it required assessments to be
made public, which it wasn't before, so

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again, it's getting better and better.

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In 2016, it tied assessments to FAO,
Food and Agriculture Organization

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guidelines, which is a UN body, and a
further resolution followed in 2022.

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As the years go on, as it gets reviewed
and as they see how things are changing

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or not changing, there are more
restrictions and there's more added to

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these guidelines and to these policies.

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This is live right now.

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It's a preparatory UN workshop on
bottom fishing impacts on vulnerable

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marine ecosystems that was held just
this past year in July 13th and 14th at

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UN headquarters in New York City, and
feeding into like a full UN General

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Assembly review later this year.

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Now, the Deep Sea Conservation
Coalition is publicly pushing for

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a firm time-bound resolution to
end bottom trawling on seamounts in

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the high seas by the end of 2027.

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And it ties into the Kunming Montreal
Global Biodiversity Framework and the

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High Seas Treaty like what we're gonna
be talking about in the next episode.

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So everything is kinda connected.

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All these policies are kinda relying
on each other, or there's… As you

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build this policy framework around
the ocean, whether it's the high

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seas, whether it's regional fisheries
management organizations, it's

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all tied together at some point.

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They all overlap.

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You have to remember, like the
ocean floor holds these gorgeous

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old living structures that are older
than some of the buildings, like most

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of the buildings in human history.

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And industrial fishing gear can
destroy them in single passes or

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destroy parts of it in a single pass.

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You gotta remember like a bottom trawl
has the net of a certain size, and

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when that drags across the bottom,
it just picks up everything and could

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destroy coral , and sponges that
create the habitat for these fish.

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There's other bottom species
as well, but this is probably

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ones we're most familiar with.

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So fisheries management isn't only about,
like fish population numbers, it's about

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protecting the physical seafloor habitat.

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And it's treated as its own public
policy and its own priority.

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Marine protected areas doesn't
just protect fish, it protects

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the habitat the fish live in.

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When you can protect the bottom
or where these fish are living,

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you end up protecting the fish.

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And actually that's an interesting segue
is that when the Harper government got in

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in Canada, they pretty much deregulated
all habitat protection within the

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Fisheries Act back in like 2012 to 2015,
before the Trudeau government got in.

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The reason why they did that, they
said, "Hey, we just want to manage

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fisheries, so we just wanna manage
the fish, not the habitats that

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they go in, that they live in.

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We just wanna manage the fisheries,
the commercial fisheries.

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That's all we should manage.

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We shouldn't manage anything else,"
even though they were related.

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But they didn't care about that because
probably one of their supporters wanted

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to fish more, and they paid a lot of
money for their campaign to get that done.

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So in Corbin when the Fisheries
Act was later revised by the

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Trudeau administration, they
started to put in more protections.

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They put back the habitat requirement
for protection, and they added more

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protections into the Fisheries Act to
make sure that it can't just be changed

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just willy-nilly as a government comes
through and wants to give more to oil

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and gas and other types of resource
intensive exploitation businesses.

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Now, going back to this bottom trawling,
policy, the 2006 protections for

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seamounts and corals were a hard-fought
compromise, by getting those extra things

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like getting the impact assessments after
an outright trawling ban failed in 2004.

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So they went for everything.

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They couldn't get it, they
went for the next best thing.

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And then the fight, like the same
fight over how far to go is playing

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out again and again and now in
the 2026 in the UN review, so

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hopefully we'll be able to get that.

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And so, the person I'm gonna be
interviewing on Friday states that,

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like, whether the resolution is agreement
that you want to happen, you know,

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they remember about getting it passed
after a 2004 moratorium push failed.

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And what they make out of is the new
push happening this year to actually

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end seamount trawling by 2027.

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It's a step-by-step
process to get things done.

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Things don't happen quickly.

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And I think a lot of the times when
we look at putting in regulations, I

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think those of us who are not familiar
with how policies are made realize

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that we can't just wait till the last
minute to protect oceans, to protect

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the planet from climate change.

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We need to push forward and
actually be able to put in policy

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as soon as possible, because we
know it's not gonna be perfect.

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We know we're gonna have to build on
it every year, every two years, every

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recurring certain interval where we can
get it better and better and better.

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So we may not get exactly what we
want in the first pass, but by putting

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it together, history has shown that
we can make them better, we can make

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them tougher and protect better.

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And as we start to see successes or even
some failures, we can really start to

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rethink, be like, "This isn't working.

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We need to try this.

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This is working really well.

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Let's continue with this.

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Let's expand on it." And without
having that as a tool and as a

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policy tool, we become just sort of
dead in the water, no pun intended.

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If you wanna help the ocean, you help
the people who want to pass the policies.

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Whether they're perfect or not.

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They're doing the best they can
to get to perfect, but they can't.

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They can't just get a ban on
trawling, as this example covered,

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but they can get close to a ban on
trawling, and that's what matters.

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And that's what matters
as we move forward.

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It helps our oceans bit
by bit, step by step.

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Okay?

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That's it for today's episode.

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Love to hear your thoughts.

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Let me know if you want to hit me up on
my socials, links in the show notes.

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And of course, don't forget to follow
this podcast if you like this kind of

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information, and share with a friend.

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Like, talk about it with people.

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Talk about the policies
that are put in place.

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Talk about how there needs to be a
step-by-step approach, and that the

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first policy that's put in place on a
specific subject like trawling, like deep

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sea trawling, doesn't always work out.

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And we need to build on that
as we go through, but we

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need to act fast to do it.

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That's how we build strong
protections for the oceans worldwide,

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not just country by country.

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But anyway, I wanna thank you so much
for joining me on today's episode of

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the 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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We'll talk to you tomorrow,
and happy conservation.