Trawling vessels pursuing fish are damaging marine ecosystems in Canada’s West Coast waters and could be operating illegally in some cases, and yet they work with insufficient transparency, a new report says. Nine large trawlers have together trawled swaths of the ocean collectively larger than the size of Ireland since 2009, according to the report, and have likely trawled in prohibited zones at least 47 times. The report, which was released as an interactive story map by the Canada-based NGO Pacific Wild on June 24, deals with trawling in the waters of British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province. It says that trawling pathways were “almost perfectly aligned” with Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) migratory routes, which are foraging areas for an endangered population of killer whales (Orcinus orca). A trawling industry group dismissed the NGO’s findings, saying they lacked context and the fishery was very well regulated. The Ireland-sized footprint includes both midwater and bottom trawling but is likely an underestimate, as Pacific Wild could not obtain complete data for the nine vessels. The figure also doesn’t include trawling conducted by the dozens of smaller vessels that have worked in the province’s waters during that time period. There were 41 trawling vessels active in 2023 and 28 in 2024, for example. Canadian authorities haven’t released trawling footprint data since 2016 despite requests from Pacific Wild. The group purchased commercial automatic identification system (AIS) tracking data from two third-party companies to complete its investigation. “The inspiration for this project was really the lack…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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