We then set up our deep-sea life display at the front of the auditorium complete with a large fishing net containing about 2000 deep sea creature messages submitted by you through the website and at our street stall in Wellington.

Then, to really make sure the messages got through, we also popped another deep-sea critter message on each seat and waited for the delegates to arrive. And arrive they did - before too long it was standing room only!

Dr Rogers gave an excellent presentation on deep-sea biodiversity and the impacts of bottom trawling. He talked about how seamounts are centres of diversity and important spawning grounds, how coral distribution correlates strongly with bottom trawling patterns, and how orange roughy populations have been severely depleted in many areas. And because orange roughy live for over 100 years and don't reach reproductive maturity until they are 30, recovery of these populations will take a long time. But then on top of that, in the hunt for orange roughy, bottom trawling has destroyed huge swathes of cold water coral eco-systems which could take hundreds of years to recover, if they do at all.

Dr Rogers then concluded by highlighting just how much there is still to learn about the deep sea. Scientists estimate that there is between 50 thousand and 10 million different species living in the deep sea. It is clear that scientists are only starting to fully understand the whole variety of life that is at risk from bottom trawling. There are big questions over species distribution and levels of endemism. Compelling reasons for a moratorium on bottom trawling to at least give science the time to work out what is going on down there.