Industry reps had been saying such things as "NZ fishers simply do not drag heavy trawl gear across pristine sea floor" (Sea Food Industry Council June 2006). But despite the evidence the destruction continued. So this year our team in New Zealand went looking for more evidence but this time, instead of confronting the fishers on the high seas, they used New Zealand's Official Information Act to extract photos from the Government.

The resulting 85 images are truly shocking. They show a litany of bottom trawling bycatch including endangered black coral from bottom trawlers fishing for orange roughy and oreos over the last two years, both within the New Zealand EEZ and in international waters. More shocking though is the realisation that this is just the tip of the iceberg!

The images are just some of the photos that were taken by the small number of fisheries observers on only some of the bottom trawl vessels during the 2004 and 2005 fishing seasons.

Amongst the species shown are CITES-listed black corals, gorgonian corals, deep-sea crabs and octopus. The presence of corals shows that virgin areas are being bottom trawled and, with the rocks, crabs and other bottom dwellers, shows undeniably that the nets are indeed hitting the bottom.

While these images tell a disturbing story, what is equally disturbing is the unseen. The unseen destruction of biodiversity that didn’t make it to the surface; the many species that died from plumes of sediment and the life that is tossed back overboard when nobody is looking.

View the slide show here