September 19, 2013 — Thanks to ongoing research in the Monterey Bay and in offshore waters, new sections of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary's (MBNMS) underwater terrain have been identified by Oceana, an international ocean conservation and advocacy organization, and other research groups as significantly less vulnerable to trawlers' dragnets than other, more complex areas. As a result, Oceana is proposing reopening sections to trawling in coming years on the condition that new closures be made in federal water fisheries outside of the bay, where highly vulnerable ecosystems have been discovered.
“We're essentially looking at these areas as bargaining chips,” says Geoff Shester, the California program director for Oceana.
The areas that could be reopened in the MBNMS are primarily soft substrate, mostly void of coral shelf and major bio-diversity, but still productive fishing grounds for trawlers, he says.
“The idea is to trade areas that appear to be muddy and flat in exchange for these rich, complex, coral-covered canyon walls that are just epic habitats,” Shester says.
Shester says these soft-sediment flat areas being considered for reopening are still vulnerable to trawling, but not as severely as the coral reef zones.
“There's relatively less impact,” he says. “It's really a lesser evil. There's less of a long-term impact in some places than in others.”
Trawling, a system fishermen have utilized in the Monterey Bay for the past 100 years, became heavily regulated in federal waters in 2006 by the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) and was outlawed in coastal California waters by the state legislature in 2005, though there are minor exceptions in Southern California.
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