Most of these little-known but already endangered fish have never been seen alive in their natural habitat, but are under threat from bottom trawling and deep-sea mining
T
hree years ago I was running a research project from a bottom trawler off Namibia about deep-sea sharks – all of which live under enormous water pressure, close to the seafloor and are rarely seen by humans.
These sharks were being brought up in the trawler’s nets. By the time they were brought to the surface, they had experienced such a dramatic change in pressure that they had undergone barotrauma, so they were internally damaged and unlikely to survive.
I am a marine biologist and my work on the trawler was to document what types of deep-sea shark the fishers were catching, accidentally, while fishing in waters between 200 and 450 metres deep.
