Life Based Learning ™
Delivering subject content through nine life themes
What is to be done with super-trawlers?
Ravaged oceans – A fishy tale: Preparing children for tomorrow’s world today
‘Sea monsters’, the size of football fields, trawl nets hundreds of metres long, catching everything in their path. These refrigerated, factory ships can catch and process up to 250 tons of fish a day.
‘Bycatch’ is the euphemistic term for everything unwanted caught up in the nets to be shovelled back into the ocean – juvenile fish, non-commercial fish, dolphins, turtles, porpoises, sharks, small whales and seals.
Bottom trawling nets scrape the ocean floor. Small hole shrimp nets are especially indiscriminate. They deplete marine fauna, destabilise the marine floor and cause excessive bycatch for every shrimp caught.
Bycatch – difficult to estimate – is put at 63 billion pounds of unwanted catch caught every year, responsible for 40% of the worlds annual marine catch.
Life-Based Learning, for 5 to 11 year old children, includes learning about the human footprint in its Physical World theme.