off the coast of me captain Daniel
fillings crew dipped into cold Atlantic
waters to retrieve a treasure that flows
like liquid soil these fish may look
nondescript but they are a veritable
linchpin of the world’s oceans
they are Eric
under the waves herring school together
in numbers that seemed to boggle the
imagination so many that scientists
struggled to get an accurate count of
their total population they are a major
source of food for a multitude of the
world’s marine animals that scooped the
month with open mouths or pick the one
by one from the water or stun them with
a flick of the tail for some species
herring are the staff of life humans to
have been fishing herring for centuries
perhaps millennia
most of these fish harvested in the
Atlantic will go for lobster bait and
for animal food while others will be
canned as sardines
it seems this ubiquitous fish is a
bountiful resource to be shared by all
but some conservationists and even
fishermen like Captain Dan are worried
that humans may be taking more than
their fair share of this ocean treasure
the trawl is fish year-round they fish
24 hours a day if they can find fish and
a lot of times they’ll steam for our
days and days of not finding fish I
think the Charla’s have mainly
responsible for the depletion of Heron
the concern centers on this method for
fishing herring called
pair trawling two ships to a net between
them so large you could fit to Sydney
Opera House’s inside so heavy the Nets
can’t be pulled on deck
and his contents are sucked into the
ship with a vacuum supporters say it’s
an effective way to harvest schools of
herring detractors say the trawlers are
depleting herring in some areas and
inadvertently killing other species of
fish and marine animals nothing bigger
than one and a half or two inches fin
escaped in that because of the mesh size
the fishing pattern that the ship’s
employ is much like plowing a field or
vacuuming your carpet back and forth
back and forth 24 hours a day until the
individual schools are wiped out it may
seem difficult to believe that such a
populous fish could be wiped out but
it’s happened before
foreign fishing fleets collapsed herring
stocks along the Atlantic seaboard in
the 1970s population eventually bounced
back and fishing resumed proponents of
trawlers say there’s no hard evidence
that hearing stocks are falling again
and say the industry only takes about 10
percent of the Atlantic’s estimated
population the conservationists worry
about something called localized
depletion when a species is wiped out of
one particular area some tuna fishermen
claimed that overfishing of herring by
trawlers has already led to a serious
drop in the local tuna that feed on them
herring is a forage fish it’s eaten by
other things in the system it’s part of
a category of marine life that we think
deserves special attention now because
when you remove these essential pillars
of the food chain there’s a tendency for
other things around them to collapse
conservationists also worry the trawlers
are killing other species with their
massive nets and we’re going to measure
every 10 fish in a Massachusetts
warehouse they searched for this
so-called bycatch and a shipment of
Harry and find some rogue fish
so we’ve got a macro they believe
however this end product doesn’t tell
the whole story the trawlers may
actually be dumping most if not all of
their dead bycatch long before they get
to the dock to unload the herring 27
another major problem is that these
fishermen are allowed it’s perfectly
legal for them to simply dump the
contents of an entire net without ever
pumping it on board if they have reason
to believe it’s fish they either don’t
want or shouldn’t have conservation
groups have tried to monitor the
trawlers but it’s difficult to do from a
farm in this video you can see dozens of
endangered pilot whales following a pair
of trawlers to feast on hearing
but only a handful of official observers
are ever actually on the ships to
monitor what’s going on instead trawlers
are supposed to report their bycatch
voluntarily we really don’t know what’s
being thrown overboard on these ships
here on the East Coast
these boats carry observers less than
three percent at the time this is sort
of the honor system of fisheries
management or as I like to call it the
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy collar
spokesman vehemently denied that there
secretly dumping illegal catch and say
their nets are designed to allow larger
prey to escape off the sides
but captain Dan who is worked on a
trawler says bycatch is indeed a serious
problem
since char nets are so massive
everything caught inside them usually
suffocates from the crush of bodies I
see a lot of waste in mid-water trawl
and a lot of bycatch issues a whale will
not rip through a trawl net and a
mid-water trawl net they get caught up
in the vacuum of the net there’s no way
out of that one from and they’ll
suffocate they can’t come to the surface
because the boat is towing them around
he now prefers a potentially less
lucrative less intense method of fishing
herring in a boat called a purse seine
then the per se if you’ve got bycatch
then you can release the bycatch in a
pauper’s to now will generally go
through the net America’s commercial
fisheries are controlled by regional
management boards the Pugh Environment
Group is leading a campaign to have the
herring quotas reassessed and to limit
and closely monitor pair trawlers or
mini herring maybe small fish but
they’re part of a large problem we’ve
become so efficient at fishing that we
may be imperiling all ocean life what
marine scientists worldwide are telling
us is is that we are essentially
vacuuming the world’s oceans of much of
the life that they contend the
management regimes which are in place
for these fish which impose quotas on
how many can be taken out of the water
really don’t take into account anything
else they don’t take into account the
needs of seabirds or whales or marine
mammals or other fish
many believe that when it comes to this
important world resource we need to take
our fair share but nothing more
sponsored by National Geographic mission
programs taking science and exploration
into the new millennium
fillings crew dipped into cold Atlantic
waters to retrieve a treasure that flows
like liquid soil these fish may look
nondescript but they are a veritable
linchpin of the world’s oceans
they are Eric
under the waves herring school together
in numbers that seemed to boggle the
imagination so many that scientists
struggled to get an accurate count of
their total population they are a major
source of food for a multitude of the
world’s marine animals that scooped the
month with open mouths or pick the one
by one from the water or stun them with
a flick of the tail for some species
herring are the staff of life humans to
have been fishing herring for centuries
perhaps millennia
most of these fish harvested in the
Atlantic will go for lobster bait and
for animal food while others will be
canned as sardines
it seems this ubiquitous fish is a
bountiful resource to be shared by all
but some conservationists and even
fishermen like Captain Dan are worried
that humans may be taking more than
their fair share of this ocean treasure
the trawl is fish year-round they fish
24 hours a day if they can find fish and
a lot of times they’ll steam for our
days and days of not finding fish I
think the Charla’s have mainly
responsible for the depletion of Heron
the concern centers on this method for
fishing herring called
pair trawling two ships to a net between
them so large you could fit to Sydney
Opera House’s inside so heavy the Nets
can’t be pulled on deck
and his contents are sucked into the
ship with a vacuum supporters say it’s
an effective way to harvest schools of
herring detractors say the trawlers are
depleting herring in some areas and
inadvertently killing other species of
fish and marine animals nothing bigger
than one and a half or two inches fin
escaped in that because of the mesh size
the fishing pattern that the ship’s
employ is much like plowing a field or
vacuuming your carpet back and forth
back and forth 24 hours a day until the
individual schools are wiped out it may
seem difficult to believe that such a
populous fish could be wiped out but
it’s happened before
foreign fishing fleets collapsed herring
stocks along the Atlantic seaboard in
the 1970s population eventually bounced
back and fishing resumed proponents of
trawlers say there’s no hard evidence
that hearing stocks are falling again
and say the industry only takes about 10
percent of the Atlantic’s estimated
population the conservationists worry
about something called localized
depletion when a species is wiped out of
one particular area some tuna fishermen
claimed that overfishing of herring by
trawlers has already led to a serious
drop in the local tuna that feed on them
herring is a forage fish it’s eaten by
other things in the system it’s part of
a category of marine life that we think
deserves special attention now because
when you remove these essential pillars
of the food chain there’s a tendency for
other things around them to collapse
conservationists also worry the trawlers
are killing other species with their
massive nets and we’re going to measure
every 10 fish in a Massachusetts
warehouse they searched for this
so-called bycatch and a shipment of
Harry and find some rogue fish
so we’ve got a macro they believe
however this end product doesn’t tell
the whole story the trawlers may
actually be dumping most if not all of
their dead bycatch long before they get
to the dock to unload the herring 27
another major problem is that these
fishermen are allowed it’s perfectly
legal for them to simply dump the
contents of an entire net without ever
pumping it on board if they have reason
to believe it’s fish they either don’t
want or shouldn’t have conservation
groups have tried to monitor the
trawlers but it’s difficult to do from a
farm in this video you can see dozens of
endangered pilot whales following a pair
of trawlers to feast on hearing
but only a handful of official observers
are ever actually on the ships to
monitor what’s going on instead trawlers
are supposed to report their bycatch
voluntarily we really don’t know what’s
being thrown overboard on these ships
here on the East Coast
these boats carry observers less than
three percent at the time this is sort
of the honor system of fisheries
management or as I like to call it the
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy collar
spokesman vehemently denied that there
secretly dumping illegal catch and say
their nets are designed to allow larger
prey to escape off the sides
but captain Dan who is worked on a
trawler says bycatch is indeed a serious
problem
since char nets are so massive
everything caught inside them usually
suffocates from the crush of bodies I
see a lot of waste in mid-water trawl
and a lot of bycatch issues a whale will
not rip through a trawl net and a
mid-water trawl net they get caught up
in the vacuum of the net there’s no way
out of that one from and they’ll
suffocate they can’t come to the surface
because the boat is towing them around
he now prefers a potentially less
lucrative less intense method of fishing
herring in a boat called a purse seine
then the per se if you’ve got bycatch
then you can release the bycatch in a
pauper’s to now will generally go
through the net America’s commercial
fisheries are controlled by regional
management boards the Pugh Environment
Group is leading a campaign to have the
herring quotas reassessed and to limit
and closely monitor pair trawlers or
mini herring maybe small fish but
they’re part of a large problem we’ve
become so efficient at fishing that we
may be imperiling all ocean life what
marine scientists worldwide are telling
us is is that we are essentially
vacuuming the world’s oceans of much of
the life that they contend the
management regimes which are in place
for these fish which impose quotas on
how many can be taken out of the water
really don’t take into account anything
else they don’t take into account the
needs of seabirds or whales or marine
mammals or other fish
many believe that when it comes to this
important world resource we need to take
our fair share but nothing more
sponsored by National Geographic mission
programs taking science and exploration
into the new millennium
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