An environmental group is raising a red flag about the damage it says a fishing fleet is causing off the B.C. coast.
Pacific Wild unveiled an interactive map on Friday, revealing what they say is the extensive and largely hidden impact of industrial trawling in B.C.
The organization said that over the last 13 years, nine factory trawlers have collectively scoured an area larger than Ireland—totalling 89,700 square kilometres—trawling both the seafloor and midwater of ecologically sensitive offshore habitats.
Bottom trawling is when heavy nets are dragged directly across the ocean floor, picking up and impacting species that live there.
Kevin Lester, a geographic information systems specialist who worked on the project, said the idea came about due to the decline of species off the B.C. coast.
“We found these nine giant trawlers that have been operating in B.C. for a few years now and we investigated their impact,” he told Global News.
“The timing of their arrival on the B.C. coast does correlate with some declines in the fisheries in the North Atlantic, so it’s probably a case of following the money or following where these vessels can be used at their full potential.”
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Among the different kinds of fishing vessels, Lester said trawlers like these are the hardest to find details about.
He said that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) stopped publishing information about them in 2016 and Pacific Wild had to spend thousands to get the data that showed they were all built in Europe and then moved to B.C. waters about 15 years ago.
“They focus most of their effort along the continental shelf, particularly in the Strait of Juan de Fuca,” Lester said.
Lester used the data to create a graphic showing the areas where the trawlers concentrate.
He said the issue is that the area is in the migratory path of Chinook salmon, which are the primary food source of B.C.’s resident orcas.
“So as the Chinook migrate from their spawning grounds out into the ocean and up to the Gulf of Alaska and back down the continental shelf, they are hit the entire way and they are as they leave and as they come back in the heaviest amount of trawling,” Lester added.
“So the numbers of bycatch that we see from these large trawlers is not a surprise given where the Chinook are.”
While the trawlers are not targeting Chinook, their massive nets can be indiscriminate and in recent years, DFO has confirmed tens of thousands of Chinook have been caught as bycatch.
Pacific Wild said it would like to see more transparency about these trawlers in B.C.’s water and better oversight of fishing practices.
Global News reached out to DFO for comment but did not hear back.
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