Following Nouvian’s belief, after environment education, there should be recognition of existing problems and actions we may take as a consumer. Hence, listed below are the few threats Nouvian has decided to raise in The Deep Exhibition.
Deep sea Trawling/ Bottom Trawling
The Deep sea is disturbed and destroyed when destructive fishing occurs at this level. Massive nets called bottom trawls are dragged at up to 2000m down the sea to catch sea. However, the catch is that the bottom is bulldozed as a result of the trawl nets, which are equipped with 5-tonne panels and heavy rollers. While such method is very productive and brings about huge haul (along with many unwanted sea creatures), it leaves a virtual desert in its wake.
The consequences are dire. Victims of this practice are the cold water coral reefs, also known as deep reefs; and the deep sea creatures.
Deep sea reefs are critical to the ecosystem of the deep sea. Individual deep-sea corals can take hundreds of years to grow, and the reefs themselves may be up to 10,000 years old. They act as critical fish nurseries, supporting corals, sponges, and a dizzying array of other animals, some of which are still unknown to science too. Trawling destroys these deepwater reefs before scientists can discover and study them. It only takes one pass of a bottom trawl to reduce all these to rubble.
Deep sea fishes such as the orange roughies are very vulnerable to any kind of fishing, as they reproduce late and live very long. The orange roughies only reach sexual maturity at the age of 25 and can live up to 160 years! They become easy targets for the fishermen to spot when they form huge schools during breeding. Thus, in an given area, the fishermen are able to fish out an entire population, and can potentially drive it to “commercial” extinction in less than 10 years. This cycle repeats when the fishes in one area is gone and the fishermen move on to another area.
Overfishing
Overfishing occurs when fishes are taken out of the ocean faster than they can replace themselves.
For a long time, fishermen were so successful that it seemed like the ocean’s supply of fish was inexhaustible. We made use of advancement in technologies to increase catch. Military developments such as satellite positioning, sonar and radar are now commonly used along with long-range ships to increase catches. To make up for decreasing catches per boat, fishing fleets have become bigger and more advanced. Such have led to overfishing. Despite such alarming signs of problems, most countries actually subsidize fishing activities.
Overfishing is hard to control as well, as it is difficult to end or significantly limit without severe backlash from people who have invested heavily in fishing boats and depended on the activity for a living. Hence, policymakers often avoid making the difficult, but necessary changes.
Overfishing is also hard to control as fishes are very mobile. Even if they are protected in one country’s waters, they may still be caught somewhere else too. Destructive fishing activities, especially bottom trawling, take place in areas outside the jurisdiction of any country. The “Tragedy of The Commons” by Hardins applies to this situation, where common goods that are not under regulations are selfishly exploited by independent individuals.
The vulnerable ones
Deep sea fishes and sharks are especially vulnerable to overfishing. This is because these sea animals tend to grow very slowly and take many years in order to reach maturity. Sharks face an additional problem – where it will only have a few offspring in its lifetime. In just 10 years of fishing a local shark population can drive them to near extinction. However for the population to recover, it would take 100 years instead. This estimate is based on the assumption that the shark population is left alone to recover, but this is never the case in reality.
The only reason why sharks are disappearing is because we eat them. Humans kill about 300,000 sharks everyday, and an estimated of 100million sharks have been killed till date. Sharks are important to the balance of the food chain in the sea. When too many predators like sharks are removed, the populations of the fishes they used to eat get bigger, but only for a while. An imbalanced ocean can cause these fish populations to get so big that there is not enough food to support them, leading to a crash in populations. If we keep eating and killing sharks unsustainably, this can lead to further imbalance of the ocean, which can further result in crash of species of fishes we consume as well.
Overall, everything on Earth is interconnected, even though the deep sea may seem very distant and remote to have any impact on human population, and vice versa.
Author’s note: In The Deep exhibition, Claire Nouvian only subtly points that it is unnecessary to overfish sharks and eat them unsustainably. However, it is interesting to note that Nouvian does not directly state what we should do or not do in a definite way. Instead, she further educates on the impact of our actions and show us the evaluation of our actions through the exhibition.