The authors analysed three ROV (remote underwater vehicle) immersions and highlighted the existence of 115 samples of litter, of which the majority was fishing gear. This type of waste does not decompose easily in deep areas and is expected to continue growing.<\/p>\n
“Fishing is a very important socio-economic activity in this region. Sadly, what has been observed in the St. Vincent canyon is similar to many other parts of the world where fishing is the main activity: the methods of control and minimisation of losing fishing gear are currently ineffective,\u201d said Frederico Oliveira, CCMAR scientist.<\/p>\n
The S\u00e3o Vicente submarine canyon is 12km off the Portuguese coast, in front of Sagres, and is 120km long. The study<\/a><\/a>, published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, <\/i> is based on three ROV immersions carried out in 2011, to depths between 93m and 553m. In total, the scientists analysed over nine hours of recorded material.<\/p>\n \u201cPractically 9 out of every 10 waste samples discovered in the S\u00e3o Vicente submarine canyon are abandoned lines and nets. This is very worrying because they are manufactured from resistant synthetic materials and the processes of decomposition are very slow at such depths. That\u2019s why, either measures are adopted to avoid the loss of fishing gear or the quantity of litter will continue to increase in the coming years,\u201d asserts Ricardo Aguilar, research director at Oceana in Europe.<\/p>\n Almost a third of all waste documented covered part of the sea bed or directly affected the fauna, with numerous cases of coral, gorgonians, sea urchins and crinoids caught up in lost fishing equipment. Moreover, it stressed how 80.8% of the finds were made in rocky areas. Waste gets caught more easily in these habitats, which house greater diversity because they act as a substratum to which organisms such as coral and sponges get attached.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Scientists from CCMAR (University of the Algarve) and Oceana have found an abundance of litter in the S\u00e3o Vicente submarine canyon, located in the south west of Portugal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6530,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-6529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6531,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6529\/revisions\/6531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6529"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=6529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}