Fishes and other Sea Animals Articles from All-Creatures.org

To Save Life in the Sea, the Greatest Predator in the Ocean Must Go Extinct

From Captain Paul Watson Foundation
October 2023

Trawlers gobble fish by the tens of tons, they gorge themselves on tens of thousands of squid, and in the process, they swallow dolphins and turtles, orcas and whales. These monstrous manmade highly mechanized industrialized machines are the greatest killing entities to have ever existed and they must be stopped.

Super Trawler Margiris, Photo Credit: Sea Shepherd France

There are huge voracious monsters stalking everything that moves in the sea.

These monsters are so big, so strong, so fast and so insatiably ravenous that no creature in the sea is safe from their rapacious gluttony.

They gobble fish by the tens of tons, they gorge themselves on tens of thousands of squid, and in the process, they swallow dolphins and turtles, orcas and whales.

These monstrous manmade highly mechanized industrialized machines are the greatest killing entities to have ever existed and they must be stopped.

The Atlantic Dawn was described by Charles Clover the author of The End of the Line as the greatest killing machine the world has ever seen.

Built at a cost of 63 million pounds thanks to loans from Irish Banks and subsidies from the government of Norway, this 144-meter-long ship, weighing 14,055 tons and powered by two 9,655 bhp diesel engines can push her through the sea at 18knots. This monstrosity is the most technologically advanced mass fish slaughtering factory on the planet. Equipped with advanced low-frequency sonar, the fish can’t hide, and they can’t outrun her.

400 tons of fish every 24 hours are hauled onboard in massive nets, filleted, frozen and pack into massive, refrigerated holds. The ship stays at sea until the freezer compartments are glutted with 7,000 tons of fish.

The ship was sent to the waters off Mauritania where it was branded as the “ship from hell” and forcefully ordered to depart from Mauritanian waters forever.

It was then sold to a Dutch consortium and renamed the Annelies Ilena and soon after was charged with illegal fishing ironically in Irish waters. It then moved into Scottish waters to diminish fish populations inside special areas of conservation.

Now owned by the Dutch company Parlevliet & Van der Plas and still registered as a Lithuanian vessel, the Annelies Ilena spent more than a week fishing in the English Channel for herring and mackerel off the coast of Sussex, and at one point came into Weymouth Bay and was within three miles of the coastline.

This notorious super trawler is the largest, but just one of many and each and every one of them leaves death and destruction inits wake.

Let’s look at the world’s second largest super trawler the Margiris. This huge vessel is 143 meters long and weighs 6,200 hundred tons. This is the ship that Sea Shepherd France caught dumping over 100,000 blue whiting into the sea off the coast of France in 2022.

The Margiris is owned by the Dutch company Parleviet & Van der Plas but flies a Lithuanian flag. It is scheduled to be back off the coast of France in November 2023.

Both the company that owns the Atlantic Dawn and the company that owns the Margiris have the audacity to call themselves sustainable fisheries.

This word “sustainable” is now just a marketing term and if a company wants to sell fish to the public that may be concerned about conservation they simple label everything they catch as sustainable.

Industrialized heavy gear fishing has never been and will never be sustainable!

In the Bering Sea, Orcas have been swallowed and killed by huge trawler nets. This has been going on for years and as this article clearly demands; where is the outrage?

Millions of dollars are spent to save a single Orca in captivity and rightfully so, but at the same time, out of sight and out of mind many more Orcas are dying in nets or starving because there simply is not enough fish to sustain them.

The Captain Paul Watson Foundation’s Neptune’s Pirates and Sea Shepherd France will be launching “OPERATION OCEAN KILLERS” within the next few months to pay a visit to the super trawler Margiris when it returns to plunder the Bay of Biscay.

The ship, the Walrus, will be used to oppose super trawlers during Operation Ocean Killers this fall! Image from Neptune's Pirates.

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