The trawler is now trying to head this way, but fortunately Greenpeace have got the anchor and a few other bits chained up and they can't move. Depending on what action the authorities take - Greenpeace will continue restricting it.
The trawler is 142 metres long. Wherever these bottom crawler monsters cruise - they leave nothing behind them. The drag nets can be 2 kms in circumference and scoop up everything within its path.
Australians are just starting to find out about the alleged deal Gillard has done with this company and when approached she was non-committal. As approx half of our farmland is now owned by foreign companies - it seems the fish in Australian waters are also up for grabs.
These trawlers only need a few people to man them as they are fully automated - yet they put thousands of small fisherman out of work. They can easily catch and store up to a thousand tons of fish a day.
Commercial fish processing ships can affect birds, whales, dolphins, turtles and sharks by their broad reach methods of catching fish.
Purse seine ships, with nets up to two kilometres in circumference, can encircle whole shoals of pelagic fish, such as mackerel, herring and tuna.
A major international scientific study released in November 2006 in the journal Science found that about one-third of all fishing stocks worldwide have collapsed (with a collapse being defined as a decline to less than 10% of their maximum observed abundance), and that if current trends continue all fish stocks worldwide will collapse within fifty years.
The FAO State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2004 report estimates that in 2003, of the main fish stocks or groups of resources for which assessment information is available, "approximately one-quarter were overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion (16%, 7% and 1% respectively) and needed rebuilding.
The threat of overfishing is not limited to the target species only. As trawlers resort to deeper and deeper waters to fill their nets, they have begun to threaten delicate deep-sea ecosystems and the fish that inhabit them, such as the coelacanth.In the May 15, 2003 issue of the journal Nature, it is estimated that 10% of large predatory fish remain compared to levels before commercial fishing. Many fisheries experts, however, consider this claim to be exaggerated with respect to tuna populations.
From 1950 (18 million tons) to 1969 (56 million tons) fishfood production grew by about 5% each year; from 1969 onward production has raised 8% annually. It is expected that this demand will continue to rise, and MariCulture Systems estimated in 2002 that, by 2010, seafood production would have to increase by over 15.5 million tonnes to meet the desire of Earth's growing population. This is likely to further aggravate the problem of overfishing, unless aquaculture technology expands to meet the needs of human population.
Overfishing has depleted fish populations to the point that large scale commercial fishing, on average around the world, is not economically viable without government assistance. Many states offer unsustainable subsidies to their fishing fleets. According to Oceana, the global fishing fleet is currently up to 250 percent larger than it needs to be to catch what the oceans can sustainably produce.
