Jason Hall-Spencer has a good news story

In the late 1990s, I saw chunks of coral reef being trawled up off the UK at a time when the fishing industry was moving into deeper waters along the European Continental Shelf edge. 

As a trained marine biologist I was flabbergasted, since the text books said that coral reefs were restricted to warm tropical waters. 

It turned out that corals were amongst the first life forms discovered during pioneering deep-sea surveys off southwest Ireland in 1869. In fact, at least as many coral species are described from the deep sea as from shallow waters and large, reef-forming corals have been known to occur in the cold waters off Scandanavia since the times of Linnaeus. However, it is only in the past few years that advances in acoustic survey and digital underwater filming technology have allowed us to film and study these deep-water habitats in detail, rather than relying on remote sampling such as with grabs.

Festival of Science publicity

At the BA Festival of Science in Dublin in 2005, organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, I was able to showcase new video taken off the southwest of Ireland from an international expedition surveying previously unseen pristine habitats at a depth of 1000 metres. The videos revealed spectacular new species of corals, but also showed that deep-sea trawling was inadvertently damaging coral reefs that were thousands of years old. 

The Royal Society had published evidence obtained in the UK, France and Norway that showed trawling damage to deep-sea habitats all along the deep-water margin of the European continent. At the 2005 Festival, this issue really caught the public imagination. I was giving a presentation of new expedition results that were podcast live on the internet, and this was followed by a flurry of newspaper and internet articles together with interviews about the story for radio and TV. This provided me with opportunities to dispel the myth that the deep sea is a monotonous expanse of mud, and to get across the message that, in fact, we have a rich complexity of deep-sea habitats around the British Isles. I was also able to suggest practical solutions to better harness these resources.

Industry collaboration

On the back of this publicity, I was granted access to government satellite tracking data showing where the international fleets of fishing boats were trawling. It turned out that areas that were rich in reef-forming corals were generally avoided by fishermen due to the damage the rough grounds caused to their gear and their catches. However, on a typical deep-water fishing trip each vessel trawls 30 square kilometres of seabed and, on occasion, the habitats formed by long-lived organisms are severely impacted.

By showing the industry charts of where corals were known to occur, and overlaying satellite tracking details of where they fished, it was possible to design closed areas that excluded trawling and other forms of fishing that impact the sea bed. It was clear that the last thing the fishing industry wanted was to be seen to be wilfully damaging the marine environment, and they were proactive in suggesting closed areas that would benefit their long-term economic sustainability. Our joint aim was to create a ‘win-win’ situation, coupling effective habitat conservation with no economic loss to the fishing industry.

It was imperative that we avoided suggesting the closure of areas that could displace trawling effort from habitats that had been impacted onto areas that were pristine.

Lobbying

With industry involvement and a sound scientific basis, the World Wide Fund for Nature and I began to lobby the EU Departments of the Environment and Fisheries.

Since the 2005 BA Festival, colleagues and I have highlighted the issues on lecture tours of fisheries advisory groups and international scientific symposia. We have helped the International Council for Exploration of the Seas to formulate advice to the EU and the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission. 

Between January and March 2007, the concerted and collaborative efforts of many people paid off with the closure of large coral-rich provinces (on Rockall and Hatton Banks) to bottom fishing gear. 

Publicity changed policy

This has been a major success story. The BA Festival brought new scientific findings to wider public attention, and this has ultimately influenced positive changes in policy for the long-term benefit of all.

The work raised many issues, including improvements to the satellite monitoring of fisheries and the development of a coherent network of offshore marine protected areas. It is gratifying that these issues are being given urgent attention by policy makers both at UK and EU level.

Dr Jason Hall-Spencer is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Marine Institute at the University of Plymouth. He will be giving a series of lectures on Europe’s deep-water realm at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition on 2-6 July 2007.