March 20, 2014 — Two commercial fishing zones off Massachusetts are among the nine dirtiest in the country, an advocacy group has found in a report slated for release Thursday.
The culprit, according to the advocacy groupOceana , is bycatch — or the fish and ocean wildlife that commercial fishermen are not targeting but that end up in their nets.
According to the report, nine US fisheries, including two off Massachusetts, are responsible for more than half the nation’s reported bycatch. These fish are often discarded at sea, “likely already dead or dying,” creating the dirty effect, the report says.
Oceana contends that bycatch is “one of the most significant threats to maintaining healthy marine ecosystems.”
The two Massachusetts-area zones are the Northeast Bottom Trawl Fishery, where more than 50 million pounds of fish are thrown overboard each year, and the New England & Mid-Atlantic Gillnet Fishery, where more than 2,000 dolphins, porpoises, and seals were caught in nets as bycatch in 2010, according to Oceana.