Word: squid
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Last week Japan announced that it would sharply curtail one of its most controversial practices: the use of drift nets. These enormous expanses of nylon mesh, which fan out for miles behind trawlers, are generally intended to catch squid and tuna, but they also indiscriminately trap and kill large numbers of other fish, seabirds, porpoises and other marine mammals. Japanese officials said they would reduce the drift-net fleet in the South Pacific to 20 ships, the same number that worked the area in the 1987-88 season. This season the fleet had grown to at least 60 boats...
...example, in Japanese signature seals, and wedding ornaments are fashioned from the shells of endangered hawksbill turtles. Japanese fishermen have drawn impassioned criticism for their use of huge drift nets across vast expanses of the Pacific. The nets, which are up to 40 miles wide, are intended to catch squid and tuna, but also entangle many other kinds of fish as well as seabirds and marine mammals. Roger McManus, president of the Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation, has gone so far as to call the Japanese "environmental terrorists...
Japanese timidity about interfering with domestic industries is perhaps most pronounced when it comes to fishing, which provides a staple of the country's diet. Japan is currently embroiled in a dispute with the U.S. and several Pacific nations about the charge that the Japanese squid fishermen inflict untold damage on marine life with their drift nets. Taiwan and South Korea also have extensive drift-net operations, but Japan's are the largest. And though U.S. fishermen, as the Japanese are quick to point out, use drift nets, they tend to be much smaller than the Asian variety...
...LaBudde, a biologist with Earthtrust, a Honolulu-based wildlife protection group, describes drift nets as "the single most destructive fishing technology ever devised by man." Drift nets work by entangling sea life in their nylon mesh. Ships later reel in the nets, taking out the squid or fish and discarding unlucky marine bystanders. It is like hunting for deer by poisoning every animal in the forest...
...called for international cooperation in monitoring catches on the open seas and enforcing fishing constraints. The U.S. and Japan later reached an agreement under which 32 U.S. observers would go aboard 460 Japanese squid-catching vessels to determine their fishing locations and count the number of sea creatures unintentionally killed by their nets. But after U.S. diplomats had worked out the arrangement, National Marine Fisheries Service officials declared it to be insufficiently stringent and called for revisions. Last week Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher told the State Department that the pact was unacceptable and would have to be renegotiated. Japan, however...