In the Gulf of Mexico, trawlers ply back and forth year in year out, hauling vast nets that scarify the seabed and allow no time for plant and animal life to recover.
In the 1970s, for instance, West Coast trawlers were landing 11,000 tonnes of bocaccio a year.In 2001, just before the fishery was closed, the catch was 214 tonnes.
Trawl fishing and the railway boom of the 1870s helped fish to reach inland areas quicker than ever before, and potatoes were already grown everywhere.
In a recent study that was produced out of Dalhousie University, it was found that dragging for shrimp is one of the most carbon-intensive ways of fishing that you can find.
But according to Amanda Vincent, a university professor and Rolex awards laureate, bottom trawling is still a danger to seahorses and she's working to protect them.
It's very effective in catching large amounts of popular seafood from crab and shrimp to flounder and whiting, and improvements in the methods and nets used has reduced the environmental problems that bottom trawling can cause.
Hundreds of thousands of trawlers scrape the ocean bottom and they remove everything in their path leaving devastation behind and its annihilation fishing pure and simple, and it has to stop.