As the altitude changes on a mountain you get different types of plants and animals that have adapted to the conditions. And in much the same way undersea mountains also have different zones with different animals the deeper you go. (They are all 'animals' down there - corals included!... because it's too dark for any plants to photosynthesise.)

These rocky seamounts or plateaus cover less than 4% of the deep sea globally and are the targets for deep sea bottom trawlers. The rest of the deep ocean floor is 'muddy ooze'.

Well, imagine you're way down in the cold darkness of the deep sea, where thickets of bamboo coral glow in the dark when something bumps into it.

An umbrella octopus is brooding her eggs on the side of the coral - they will take around 14 months to hatch.

Suddenly heavy rollers beneath a bottom trawl net rip though. The net takes everything in its path and great plumes of sediment muddy the waters.

Everything that isn't caught up in the net is smashed. As the sediment gradually settles on the devastation, it smothers and kills coral and other animals in the surrounding area.

These are ancient ecosystems that have been unchanged for millennia.

Scientists are saying that 18-52% of species living on each seamount exists there and NOWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. That's why extinction is so easy with bottom trawling.

There is no future in bottom trawling. The trawlers plunder one area, exhaust it, and relentlessly move on to seamount after seamount. Bottom trawling does not sustain life, it does not sustain fish populations and, as the people of New Foundland have unfortunately already found out, it does not sustain jobs.

You'd think that if Talley's, the Seafood Industry Council and the Orange Roughy Management Company really believed in sustainable fishing they'd be on our side. Instead, they're defending the most destructive fishing method ever devised.

Because Greenpeace has created a bit of a stir, we're starting to hear some weird and wild claims from the bottom trawling industry and their mates about how good bottom trawling is.

Well, we thought that might happen, so we've released a report called 'Red Herrings'. It totally debunks the bottom trawling industry's PR spin with good strong science and shocking examples.

For example, did you know that between 1997 and 1998 bottom trawlers trawling in new areas on the South Tasman Rise caught 4,000 tons of orange roughy ... but in doing so they brought up over 10,000 tons of coral that they then dumped over the side!

- Dean
(Communications Officer, Greenpeace NZ)