Bottom trawling causes significant welfare harm to marine animals, and expanding effectively protected areas could reduce the scale of this impact.
Bottom trawling is one of the most welfare-significant human activities in the marine environment, causing suffering and death to billions of individual animals annually. Non-target bycatch — invertebrates, fish, and air-breathing animals like dolphins and turtles — is caught, injured, and typically discarded dead or dying. Target species experience the stress and injury of capture in trawl nets before suffocation or injury on deck. The scale makes this one of the most significant sources of animal suffering globally by any metric. Expanding effectively enforced marine protected areas to prohibit bottom trawling would deliver welfare benefits at a scale few other interventions can match. Consumer purchasing power — choosing sustainably certified seafood — creates market pressure alongside regulatory advocacy.