Life History: Fisheries and Sea Turtles
Another devastating fishery on the southeastern coast is the trawler shrimp fishery. Trawlers, rigged with two wide-mouthed trawls, repeatedly drag the bottom off the Carolina-Georgia-Florida coast to capture shrimp churning the bottom habitat and tearing loose epifaunal and digging up shallow infauna. This activity, although effective in catching shrimp, brings a wealth of once-living sea life to the surface, shrimp, crabs, horseshoe crabs, fish, sharks, etc., killing much of it during trawling and while lying on the deck and plowing the bottom over and over.
It is to the credit of Georgia fisherman that they anticipated and partly solved the problems of drowning sea turtles caught in nets by inventing Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) that shunt turtles out of the trawl net as trawling proceeds. The increase in size of the escape hatch in the TEDs in 2004 has largely resolved the problems of capturing and drowning sea turtles in the nets. However, the problem of by-catch, all those organisms that are sacrificed (up to 90% of the contents of the trawl net) for the taste of shrimp, remains unresolved. It is the opinion of the SCISTCP that trawl-net fisheries are not sustainable, they do not target specific species nor do they follow a sustainable management plan; they are simply raping the sea and destroying brood stocks of invertebrates and vertebrates, and incidentally sea turtles, for a short-term gain of a few individuals.
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| Georgia trawler with gear stowed. | Georgia trawler with gear deployed. |
The noncommercial, recreational fishery is based upon fishing from small boats, and that is the crux of the problem. Small boats, with large outboard or in board motors, skim rapidly across the water darting from place to place, often colliding with marine vertebrates, including sea turtles. These collisions dramatically damage sea turtles, and other marine vertebrates, by cracking or cutting the animals and injuring them to a point where they are invaded by bacteria or die from their wounds. It is the opinion of the SCISTCP that recreational fisheries are not sustainable, they do not target specific species nor do they follow a sustainable management plan; they are simply raping the sea and destroying brood stocks of vertebrates, especially sea turtles, for a short-term enjoyment of a few individuals.
Members of the marine fisheries need to become responsible stewards of the environment and assure the least possible destruction to the natural systems that is possible. The decline of many fisheries due to over fishing is a clear as global warming, if fisheries are not managed in a sustainable manner, they need to be eliminated.