Greenpeace issued a fresh call on Monday to stop the practice of bottom-trawling, saying the international organizations that manage fish stocks were doing nothing to stop the destruction of ocean beds. The conservation group says trawlers hunting for fish such as the orange roughy let their nets drag along the seabed at depths of up to 2 km (1.2 miles), destroying everything in their wake, according to Reuters. "We have documented an enormous range of the deep sea life that's coming up in these nets, including 500-year-old pieces of coral that are just ripped out of the seabed and (then) tossed back over the side," said Bunny McDiarmid of Greenpeace. Last year a group of international scientists blamed around a dozen nations for the practice, including Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Iceland and Norway. World fish stocks are managed by a number of regional international bodies and last year the United Nations General Assembly asked these groupings to look into bottom-trawling. But Greenpeace said on Monday that the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), which covers Canadian waters, and other such groups were very poor on protecting species.
