It is highly destructive in two ways. Though efficient, trawling is also undiscriminating. In minutes, the nets wipe out coral reefs that might have taken thousands of years to grow, leaving a flattened lifeless field in their wake. The indiscriminate carnage it causes is not unlike, as one writer put it, hunting for squirrels by stringing a net a mile wide between immense all-terrain vehicles and dragging it at speed across the plains of Africa. The main difference is that in the case of the African plains, the public would be outraged to learn that the vast majority of what gets caught is
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