History of Trawling and Ecological Impact

Abstract

Bottom trawling developed from the practice of fishing with a net or long lines, but that older style was able to be more controlled and discriminate in its catch. With bottom trawling, nets are weighted to keep them low along the seafloor and a large beam on deck spreads nets wide to increase catch. Marine biologists and environmentalists have been concerned about trawling since it began. As far back as 1376, the English parliament highlighted the destructive nature of the practice to fish populations and habitats, noting that it ‘runs so heavily and hardly over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land’ and takes so many fish ‘to the great damage of the commons and the destruction of the fisheries’ (Petition by the Commons to King Edward III, 1376 seen in Bolster, 2012). This first known mention of trawling calls for the removal of the practice and yet the activity endures. Trawling in Europe continued sporadically through the medieval and early modern periods using mainly the beam trawl method until the early nineteenth century when the industrial revolution pushed the technology further.