In Dead Water: Merging of climate change with - UNEP

These unique features make seamounts a lucrative target for
fisheries in search of new stocks of deep-water fish and shellfish,
including crabs, cod, shrimp, snappers, sharks, Pacific
cod, orange roughy, jacks, Patagonian toothfish, porgies, groupers,
rockfish, Atka mackerel and sablefish. Our knowledge of
seamounts and their fauna is still very limited, with only a
tiny fraction of them sampled and virtually no data available
for seamounts in large areas of the world such as the Indian
Ocean (Ingole and Koslow, 2005). Often, fishermen arrive before
the scientists. For a short time period, sometimes less
than 3 years, the catches around seamounts can be plentiful.
However, without proper control and monitoring, especially
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in areas beyond national jurisdiction, stocks are exploited unsustainably
and collapse rapidly. The reason for this ‘boom
and bust’ are the characteristics of many deep-water organisms:
unlike their counterparts in traditional, shallow-water
fishing grounds, the deep-sea fish targeted around seamounts
are long-lived, slow to mature and have only a few offspring
(Glover and Smith, 2003; Johnston and Santillo, 2004). This
makes them highly vulnerable to over-fishing by industrial
fishing practices (Cheung et al., 2007). In addition, the benthic
communities, which support these fish stocks and their
recovery, are seriously damaged or completely destroyed by
the impact of heavy bottom trawling and other fishing gear