Marine miseries

12 August 2012

biswabrata goswami
DIGHA, 12 AUG: Fishermen living along the Bengal coast, who depend on the marine fishes for their livelihood, are incurring huge losses due to illegal fishing by the foreign trawlers. Hundreds of fishermen of Bay of Bengal have lost their jobs in the past few years due to unavailability of fishes within the traditional catch area.
A survey on the relationship between fish diversity reported that illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing is depleting marine fish stocks and damaging the ecosystems of the oceans.
The deep sea habitat is also under threat from the crude and destructive methods of fishing that are often used. The nets are huge and usually weighed down with heavy bolts. As they are dragged along the bottom of the ocean they rip everything in their paths, and scoop up everything from the sea bed. These include corals and sponges and some of these are hundreds of years old. The final result is a totally destroyed marine environment that took hundreds of years to develop. Since none of this material has a commercial value for the fishermen it is simply dumped back into the ocean as by-catch, the survey reported. According to reports from Digha Fishermen and Fish Traders’ Association, with the introduction of diesel using powerboats, deep-sea fishing and mechanisation in fishing is taking an upturn. It has been observed in Digha coastal areas that total marine fish landing mainly consists of sardine, hilsa, coila, pomphret, croakers, Bombay duck, catfish, ribbon fish, shark, shankar, prawn etc. Thus total 37 varieties of fish are found here. Among them contribution of hilsa in total catch per trip was found to be maximum in Digha.