Controlled trawl studies are rare as few researchers can dictate when fleets go out and where they go. But the conservancy is in a unique position. Following the collapse of the Pacific Coast bottom fish fishery in 2000, it bought permits from struggling fishers. It now owns 7 percent of the catch quota for Pacific Coast bottom fish, and has a monopoly over waters extending out from Morro Bay. This has allowed it to launch an ambitious plan: to create a new sustainable fisheries model.
A team wanted to know how often trawlers can rake over a section of muddy sea floor before habitats can no longer recover. Records held by the National Marine Fisheries Service show parts of the continental shelf can be trawled between zero and 10 times a year. So last year, to mimic low-intensity trawling, four plots were hit twice. This October, they were each trawled five times, mimicking a high-intensity trawl. The Beagle took pictures immediately after each event, as well as six and 12 months after the first trawl.
Early signs indicate that marine life survived, even thrived, after last year’s trawls. Since then, the Beagle has spotted sharks, flatfish and thick schools of squid that dove, kamikazestyle, into its red laser lights. Donna Kline, a fish ecologist at California State University in Monterey Bay, thinks that far from destroying a habitat, the trawl may have created a new one by etching grooves into the flat bottom.
Read the complete story from New Scientist.