The sad-looking blobfish has good reason for it: it swims about on great Australian depths on the verge of extinction.
The fish, with an unfortunate name and an appearance appreciated by few but his mother, is living on depths below 800 metres, a habitat it has the bad fortune of sharing with crabs and lobsters, a target catch for Australian and New Zeeland deep-sea trawling fleets, among the most efficient in the world.
‘Blobfish are very vulnerable to being dragged up in these nets and from what we know this fish is only restricted to these waters”, says Professor Callum Roberts, a deep-sea expert at the University of York.
“Bottom trawling is one of the most destructive forms of fishing”, he remarks, and adds that “’we’ve been overfishing areas up to about 200 metres deep and now we have moved off those continental shelves and into the deep sea in areas a couple of thousand metres deep”.
“In 2006 conservationists came within a whisker to achieving a global moratorium on restricting bottom trawling on the high seas, but Iceland rejected it”.