Greenland

A mixed assemblage of corals, sponges and sea pens that make up a part of a potential vulnerable marine ecosystem in the Davis Strait. Image courtesy of ZSL and ...

If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page. For his part, Roberts of iAtlantic said the government and the fishery could consider shifting to longline fishing as a less destructive way of catching halibut. The Davis Strait seabed is home not only to the corals, sponges and sea pens highlighted by the ZSL, but also to numerous species that grow into the mud but are “too small to see with cameras,” Watling said. “The West Greenland area is vast, so freezing the current trawling footprint should work,” said Les Watling, a professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who has extensively studied deep-sea organisms and seamounts in the North Atlantic Ocean. Asked whether the discovery of potential VMEs in areas subject to trawling would affect the Greenland halibut fishery’s MSC certification, Elvar Lund, stakeholder and engagement manager at MSC North Atlantic, said MSC-certified fisheries must avoid impacting VMEs through the application of “precautionary management measures” that the MSC reviews every five years. According to Kaergaard, it did so as a condition for the halibut fishery to continue receiving MSC certification, and “to ensure that potential VMEs were not harmed” until more was known about the seabed there and the management plan could be implemented. we’ve had a look at this in London, and it’s really bad news for the sea floor to do deep sea fishing,” Long said, adding that the way forward is to mitigate high impact. Policymakers are looking for ways to protect both the fisheries and the marine environment — a tricky balance to strike. The fishing of halibut, both inshore and offshore, brings in sizeable revenue: the island’s largest company, a state-owned fishing enterprise called Royal Greenland, reported that in 2021 Greenland halibut accounted for 25% of its total sales of $808 million, which is just over a quarter of [Greenland’s total GDP](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=GL) of $2.98 billion. As part of the certification process, SFG needed to remedy a dearth of knowledge about the impact of commercial trawling on the seabed, so it commissioned the ZSL to undertake a study. The remote-controlled video sled the ZSL scientists deployed to capture the video took 40 minutes just to sink to the bottom at each of the 76 sites the researchers examined in and around Greenland’s two Davis Strait halibut fishing grounds. Because of the low temperatures in the deep sea, organisms that dwell there often have long life spans — sometimes more than a century — and take decades to reach sexual maturity.