Scientists call for end to fishing fuel subsidies

A team of international scientists is calling for an end to government fuel subsidies that allow commercial fishing fleets to move to deeper and deeper water.

"The bottom line is that mistakes made now could take over a century to recover, if they are at all reversible," says [Krista] Baker. Baker and Richard Haedrich of Memorial University in Newfoundland looked at the complete deep-sea fish fauna of the North West Atlantic – one of the first attempts to do so. They found that 40% of the deep-sea species for which data are available, are in decline. "This is a steady decline, just down and down until the cupboard is almost bare," says Baker. "Given the documented declines and the lack of life history data to know what recovery times would even be, conservation measures in the deep-sea are urgent now."