Heartbreaking Video Shows Fish Fleeing Huge Nets

David Attenborough has become the voice we associate with all things beautiful in nature, but he's never shied away from showing the harrowing destruction that humans visit upon our planet.

This, however, might be the biggest gut-punch he's delivered yet. In his latest documentary "OCEAN," Attenborough presents us with unique footage showing the devastating effects of bottom trawling on the seafloor, right where the action is happening. The filmmakers placed a camera underwater, showing us the actual view of the trawl net as it sweeps up countless poor sea creatures, who desperately try to out-swim their doom.

It's an unprecedented look — but it doesn't make for easy viewing.

"I have seen the bycatch on the deck of trawlers, but like everybody else, I had never seen what the trawl does underwater," Enric Sala, a marine ecologist who served as executive producer and scientific advisor on Ocean, told IFLScience in a recent interview. "Being at the level of the net and seeing all these poor creatures trying to escape the net, that's something that nobody else had seen."

Bottom trawling is a widely used method of fishing that involves dragging an enormous net across the seafloor, ensnaring hundreds if not thousands of aquatic creatures in a single sweep. It's a blunt approach that doesn't discriminate between species. Most of the fish that get caught aren't even what the fishermen are looking for, but they perish anyway.

"Over three-quarters of a trawler's catch may be thrown away," Attenborough narrates in the documentary. "It's hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish."

Trawling also ravages the seafloor itself, as the heavy chain or beam that keeps the net open smashes into any rock or aquatic fauna in its path, while dredging up literal tons of sediment. 

"The trawlers tear the seabed with such force, that their trails of destruction can be seen from space," Attenborough says.

It gets worse. As the seabed is thrown up, so are the vast stores of carbon it harbored. A massive 2024 study estimated that some 370 million metric tons of carbon dioxide is released by bottom trawling every single year. That puts it "on the scale of global aviation," Sala said, which produces nearly a billion tons annually.

In terms of both the greenhouse impact and the sweeping scale of the damage wreaked to local habitats, it's the ocean's equivalent to deforestation. One study estimated that bottom trawlers scrape 1.9 million square miles of seafloor per year, roughly equivalent to 1.3 percent of the entire ocean.

"It's happening everywhere around the ocean, including in many of our protected areas," Toby Nowlan, the director and producer on OCEAN, told IFLScience. "The difference being that this is as destructive as bulldozing your local ancient woodland, or the Amazon rainforest." 

"If my local ancient woodland, Leigh Woods, was just bulldozed, the entire city would be up in arms, but this is what's happening underwater," Nowlan added. "The whole reason [people aren't up in arms about trawling] is that it's remained hidden from view."

Not anymore.

More on the ocean: Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species' Image

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