Source: Radio NZ
Author: Kate Gudsell
The petition was launched by environmental groups the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, ECO, Forest and Bird, Greenpeace, LegaSea and WWF-New Zealand as well as recreational fishers.
It is calling for the government to ban the destructive practice on seamounts, or submarine mountains, and other ecologically sensitive areas.
A recent report from NIWA on the impact of bottom trawling, concluded that the benthic communities on the seamounts had low resilience to the effects of bottom trawling.
It said New Zealand’s major deepwater fisheries occur on seamounts for a number of fish species, including orange roughy.
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