On February 3, 2022, a fishing boat in French waters dropped 100,000 dead blue cod, which was photographed by a French environmental organization. This huge school of fish looked like a pile of waves from a distance, and when you looked closely, you found that the carcasses of these fish had exposed their silver-white bellies, close together, densely packed, like a giant carpet, floating on the sea. What the hell is going on?
It is understood that the fishing boat, named FV Margiris, is currently the second largest super fishing vessel in the world and belongs to the Dutch company Parlevliet Van der Plats. The 142-metre-long and 9,500-tonne Majlis is equipped with a 600-metre-long and more than 200-metre-wide net. With this net, 150 to 300 tons of fish can be easily fished.
The Margiris fishing.
After obtaining a fishing permit from France, they went to French waters to fish. But on the day of the incident, they used nets that were more than 1 kilometre long, allowing them to catch more fish, so they were strongly condemned by environmental authorities. The boat dragged more than 100,000 fish from the nets to the Atlantic coast of France, causing all the fish to be discarded.
100,000 fish float on the surface of the sea like white waves.
Although the head of the fishing boat company said that the incident was caused by a leak caused by a broken fishing net, environmental groups are convinced that they deliberately abandoned it. The French Ministry of Fisheries was also shocked when it looked at the 3,000-square-meter "carpet of fish", and then intervened with the European Fisheries Commission to investigate.
So, was the "fish leakage" accident accidental or deliberate? If it was deliberate, then what was the purpose of the fishing boat?
French environmentalists believe that this is a deliberate abandonment of fish, and suspect that the fishing company made the decision because it was too cumbersome to process.
I have to say that this suspicion actually has some truth. First of all, the fish that were abandoned this time were all blue cod, which was not really "cod", but only had the name "cod". Blue cod is relatively small, about the length of a human hand, but it is relatively small. It is troublesome enough to remove the internal organs of this small fish during processing, and Europeans are used to separating the meat, bones, skin and head, so the processing of 100,000 blue cod is definitely a headache. Although the vessel has a well-developed system for sorting and processing the fish it catches, the fishing company cannot afford such high costs.
Some friends may say, can't handle the fish, isn't it good to catch it and keep it, why do you have to throw it away? What a waste!
In fact, it is more common practice on distant-water fishing vessels to throw unsellable or worthless fish back into the sea. In fishing, they are called bycatches, which are animals that fishermen inadvertently catch while fishing for other marine species. By-catch includes captured and released animals, as well as animals that have died accidentally during fishing operations.
However, the EU has banned the discarding of by-catches. This is because many marine animals will die once they are caught, and there is no point in putting them back into the sea. In the eyes of environmentalists, this is not only detrimental to sustainable fishing, but also pollutes the marine environment.
Trawling. The reason why marine animals die in large numbers during the fishing process has a lot to do with the way they are fished. Large fishing vessels such as the Margiris tend to use trawling to catch fish. That is, after the fishing net is arranged, it is fixed on the hull of the boat and begins to sail, and the fish in the sea are "pocketed" and then the net is collected. The fish caught in this way are squeezed together, and it is very easy to suffocate to death.
At the same time, some deep-sea fish suddenly catch shallow water or go ashore after adapting to the high-pressure environment of the deep sea, which is also very easy to lead to death.
Large distant-water fishing vessels catch a lot of by-catch after a long time at sea, and the fishing boats separate these fish from the fish that can be sold for money. Valuable fish are quickly processed and refrigerated on board, while fish like blue cod are not only cumbersome to process, but also have low use value, and can only be processed into animal feed such as fish oil and fishmeal. Therefore, after the blue cod is accumulated to a certain amount, it takes up too much space on the boat, and the dead fish may still rot and stink, so they are thrown into the sea.
The discarding of dead fish was the first to express its opinion that the more than 100,000 discarded blue cod should also be included in the vessel's fishing quota. But in fact the total weight of these fish will not exceed a hundred tons, with the Magires 1The quota of 80,000 tons is just a drop in the bucket, and such a punishment sounds really insignificant. Not surprisingly, the ship is still fishing freely in French waters.
French environmentalists were furious when they saw 100,000 dead fish floating on the surface, believing that abandoning them would pollute the ocean. In fact, despite the abundance of dead fish, it is unrealistic to cause massive damage to the quality of the oceans.
Environmentalists are not wrong to worry that dead animal carcasses will decompose and deteriorate, which in turn will pollute the water environment. If it is in some closed ditches or ponds, dead fish can indeed breed a lot of bacteria and fungi, and at the same time, due to the closed environment, it will further pollute the water quality. However, in the high salinity of seawater, the growth of bacteria is greatly inhibited, so dead fish are less likely to rot and stink.
People often say that "when a whale falls, everything is born", it is not difficult to understand when we think of whale falls. A whale can grow up to 30 meters long and weigh hundreds of tons, and after death, such a behemoth will not only not pollute the water, but will also become food for other marine life, feeding more creatures. It can be seen that these 100,000 blue cod will also be quickly digested by other animals in the sea.
In addition, the world's oceans are interconnected, not closed ponds, and their self-purification ability is very strong, and it can quickly recover to its original state, which is what the ancients said "flowing water does not rot".
Whale falls. In fact, what we should really be worried about is not the problem of pollution, but the plight of marine life caused by extensive human fishing. According to statistics, the annual catch of the world's oceans is nearly 100 million tons, and between 1974 and 2015, the sustainable level of global wild fishery resources fell from 90% to 669%。In 2015, there were 33One percent of wild fisheries are subject to unsustainable overfishing, and 30 percent of total catches are discarded from marine fishing.
If all fishing vessels, like the Margiris, trawl and harvest millions of tons of marine life at a time, the ocean's ability to regenerate will eventually come to an end. Not to mention the fact that the ship abandoned more than 100,000 fish at once.
Therefore, in terms of fishing, human beings should formulate and abide by sustainable fishing rules, and do not fish at all costs.