Australia finds 130 kilometers of illegal nets in Southern Ocean
By ANDREW DARBY
November 7, 2009
HOBART: The Rudd Government has pulled plans to publicise the discovery of massive illegal fishing nets in the Antarctic while the ship that found them, Oceanic Viking, is under a different spotlight. Bottom-set gillnets are presenting a new crisis in Australia’s regional waters. Laid by foreign fishers, they form a ”curtain of death” on the deep-sea floor. But plans to expose the quantity of illegal nets found by the customs vessel on fisheries patrol have been sidelined. Oceanic Viking found nets totalling 130 kilometres in length on Banzare Bank in the Southern Ocean earlier this year, sources told the Herald yesterday. Use of the nets is outlawed by the 25-nation Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, but rich pickings of Patagonian toothfish are leading illegal fishers to set them anyway. The Government had planned to publicise the finds at a meeting of the commission in Hobart this week. But while the Oceanic Viking was caught up in Indonesia with Sri Lankan asylum seekers, the Opposition began to ask why it was not doing its fisheries job. In April the vessel found nets of five to nine kilometres in length but did not have the gear to pull them up. So it called on a licensed fishing vessel nearby, owned by Austral Fisheries of Perth, which recovered 29 tonnes of toothfish, a bycatch of skate, and about 10 kilometres of net. The rest was ripped up and sunk. Glenn Sant, the global marine program leader at TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network, said the discovery was devastating for the marine environment in the commission area. ”These nets are actually an invisible curtain of death for everything that swims into them,” he said. ”The nets kill indiscriminately, and if they are lost they keep killing as ghost nets.” …
