Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Let's assume that these incidents actually were accidents, there's still a bigger question open: why is trawler fishing still allowed? Imagine it's not a fiber cable that ends up being crushed by a trawl door... but all the other marine life: Fish can swim away (or not, being the point of getting fished), but plants, corals, bugs?

Trawler fishing is devastating for the local ecology, we just don't see the damage - to quote [1], page 16:

> Seabed habitats are under significant pressure across European seas from the cumulative impacts of demersal fishing, coastal developments and other activities. Preliminary results from a study presented in SWD(2020) indicate that about 43% of Europe’s shelf/slope area and 79% of the coastal seabed is considered to be physically disturbed, which is mainly caused by bottom trawling. A quarter of the EU’s coastal area has probably lost its seabed habitats.

Honestly I'm pretty much in favor of banning trawler fishing and the import of trawler-fished fish into the European Union, even if it's just to protect our fiber links.

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/720778d4-bb17...

I agree. The more you learn about trawling the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.

Where I live it’s cut back dramatically, but the bizarre thing is that it’s strictly permitted in territories where we know rare deep sea glass sponge reefs exist, and once thrived. These reefs are islands of immense diversity and biomass which fed huge numbers of transient species moving through the deep. They were also nurseries for a large number of fish species we commonly fish for.

We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective.

> We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective.

Our fish industry is really well connected politically and the large players exactly know how to play the fiddle, and any attempt to hold the foreign ones accountable with actually working and appropriate measures (it's highly likely that it will take live ammunition or an intentional collision, at least in legally "open" seas) would likely result in WW3.

To add to that, the extent of slavery taking place on fishing vessels operating in international waters is enormous. The laws to board and free captive slaves have been in the books going back to the 1800s in the case of Britain, yet nothing is done about it globally. The media and researchers who detail it are hesitant to even use the term “slavery”.

Outlaw ocean episode: https://music.amazon.ca/podcasts/9d669553-a9ee-4cf2-96fd-311...

  the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.

Financial "incentives" from fishing industry and political ramifications of raising food prices (seafood is a large portion in some places).

It's absolutely an existential threat to the ecology of the entire Earth yet those are the reasons why. "Close to 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted."

Source: https://www.unep.org/facts-about-nature-crisis

Fishing as carried out industrially is terrible for the environment as a whole, and really often also exploits those employed in it. The huge army of Asian fishing fleets that skirt the law and the ethics of both sides of this are the worst of the worst, however, and deep sea trawling is particularly awful. Then again, farmed fish isn't exactly ecologically brilliant either...

They do more than skirt laws and ethics. A large amount of fishing vessels operating in several regions around the world practice outright slavery. Working-age men are lured into debt-bonding to work at sea indefinitely for no wages up to 20 hours per day with little to no food until they succumb to exhaustion, injury, or disease, or if they show signs of resistance, are executed as an example to the other enslaved men. When someone dies, their remains are thrown overboard. Most accounts of this have only surfaced because people have bought the freedom of some of these men, who are seen as nothing but a labor resource, bought and paid for usually directly by the captain, in order to catch otherwise mostly unprofitable fish. If an industry is prepared to engage in slavery, playing fast and loose with international borders and environmental regulations is of course not a concern to that industry.

Complete agree. The hidden damage we are doing to marine ecosystems is horrendous.

I love eating seafood but have basically given it all up due to environmental concerns, there's very few fisheries left that are harvested sustainably and farmed fish as an alternative cause a host of other problems for marine wildlife in the area.

Even the sustainable types of fish usually end up with huge amounts of bycatch that it's hard to justify eating them too.

At this point the only seafood I can eat is something I've caught myself and isn't of concern for sustainability, Australia is lucky in that respect with quite a few species thriving but we still face a lot of illegal fishing in our waters that's incredibly hard to police.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-trawling_device

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/07/mud-muck-and-death-cambodi...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8823369/Gree...

https://www.huckmag.com/article/paolo-fanciulli-the-italian-...

Cool. Will you pay the cost difference afterwards? I kinda don't like the taste of bugs.

Allright, let's not do anything, ever.

Cool. How about you paying cost of the wildlife?

> Will you pay the cost difference afterwards?

Are you asking if I would be willing to pay more money for goods that don't irreversibly destroy ocean ecosystems and that aren't made with slave labor?

I struggle to imagine the kind of person who would say no to such a question. Someone with no money in a country with no safety net on the verge of starvation? Someone with no moral comapass?

> I kinda don't like the taste of bugs.

I don't understand what bugs have to do with ocean trawling. Is this an unusual way of referring to lobster?

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