Translated by Els Derho
Translation of the article in the link. After reading, ask yourself this: Do we learn from the past or do we continue to accept this?
http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/5381/Bedreigde-Dieren/article/detail/1065737/2010/02/11/Het-tuig-van-de-duivel-en-de-teloorgang-van-kabeljauw.dhtml
The means of the devil and the decline of cod
Before the industrial revolution, The North Sea contained about 7,7 milion tons of cod. At the end of the 18th century an average cod was abo...ut 1 meter in length. Today, the population of cod is estimated at 40 to 45.000 ton with an average length of 40 centimeters.
The North Sea has been the test area for the industrial fishery and it has changed the bottom of the sea in less than 200 years into a desolated mud plains. It’s hard to believe, but before that the bottom of The North Sea was covered with sponge gardens, gorgonian and cold water corals.
1366... Lees verder
The use of towed nets (also known as beam trawls, trawl nets), has declined the population of larger fish such as cod, with 97%. When it arrived in 1366, a towed net was nothing more than that: a net that was dragged behind a boat over the bottom of the sea.
But even then it caused amongst the common fishermen a commotion. They asked the English King Edward III to prohibit the practice. Because, as was a written by a court writer, "this Devil's tool is destroying the flowers of the sea, the shell fish, the plants and so on, where larger fish live on."
Pigs
The "Devil's tool" already produced all English fishermen to catch more than the population could eat. The surpluses, were fed to the pigs. In Flanders, in 1499 the trawl net was effectively banned, and a century later, the French King put heavy penalties on the use of it.
But to the trawl net was too good to hold back. The ban didn’t last for long, and the Flemish fishermen were pioneers in the refinement of the technology. They invented for example, a net with a wooden bar that was used to scoop out shrimp. They used horses to pull it.
The tree of the Scots
However, the real drama was not until 1891, when the Scots, invented the prototype of the modern net: a beam trawl, holds a "tree", a metal tube, at the front of the net. At the ends of the tree are heavy steel sledges, which plow the sea bottom, up to 15 cm deep. This takes power, and it was available with the arrival of the steam boat.
The thing worked so well with steam ships, the British fleet in just 20 years, had eight times more boats, and, in particular, the capacity to fish had increased more than 14 000 times. Newspaper articles from 1911 show stories about the destruction made and called for a moratorium.
1954: globalization of the fishing
In 1954, the next major step had been taken: the British put the Fairtry to water, a fishing trawler 85 metres in length and weighed 2600 tons and allowed to fish on the Grand banks, off the coast of Canada and New England. The globalization of the fishing was a fact. Ten years later, 300 Russian ships to the model of the Fairtry were fishing on the Grand banks, quickly followed by Norwegians, the Japanese, and Spanish.
Duck in belly of cod
In 1992, the Grand banks, that held the largest fish stock our world has ever had, is now empty. The Basques, the first to fish there on a large scale in the 16th century, told stories of "cod as big as a man". The first settlers of the American continent, said there were so many cod that "they simply took them with baskets out of the water".
In 1895, a cod was caught off the coast of Newfoundland that weighed 97 kilos. There were instances in which they found duck in their stomach. In 1923, the average weight was already fallen from 34 to 9 kilograms. And in 1992 the cod was gone. A moratorium had been set, but almost 18 years later, the cod is still not returned