In Dead Water

These unique features make seamounts a lucrative target for

fisheries in search of new stocks of deep-water fish and shell-

fish, including crabs, cod, shrimp, snappers, sharks, Pacific

cod, orange roughy, jacks, Patagonian toothfish, porgies, grou-

pers, rockfish, Atka mackerel and sablefish. Our knowledge of

seamounts and their fauna is still very limited, with only a

tiny fraction of them sampled and virtually no data available

for seamounts in large areas of the world such as the Indian

Ocean (Ingole and Koslow, 2005). Often, fishermen arrive be-

fore the scientists. For a short time period, sometimes less

than 3 years, the catches around seamounts can be plentiful.

However, without proper control and monitoring, especially

in areas beyond national jurisdiction, stocks are exploited un-

sustainably and collapse rapidly. The reason for this ‘boom

and bust’ are the characteristics of many deep-water organ-

isms: unlike their counterparts in traditional, shallow-water

fishing grounds, the deep-sea fish targeted around seamounts

are long-lived, slow to mature and have only a few offspring

(Glover and Smith, 2003; Johnston and Santillo, 2004). This

makes them highly vulnerable to over-fishing by industrial

fishing practices (Cheung

et al

., 2007). In addition, the ben-

thic communities, which support these fish stocks and their

recovery, are seriously damaged or completely destroyed by

the impact of heavy bottom trawling and other fishing gear