Orange roughy in the depths of despair

Another Life: Up in the dark on stormy mornings, an ocean squall lashing at the windows, I find that the BBC shipping forecast, with its lengthy litany of sea areas and wind speeds, can be oddly calming to the spirit. There are nearly always worse places to imagine: Rockall, for example.

The forecasts merely borrow the name, for Rockall itself is a pinpoint in the ocean: a tiny cone of granite some 20 metres high, poking up from the great Atlantic waves almost half-way to Iceland. In a big storm, water seethes right over the rock, rinsing it clean of its icing of bird-droppings. Nothing grows on Rockall, except for a few lichens and the fringe of long, brown kelp that swirls around its base. It is almost as hard as it looks to land on Rockall without a helicopter. The object has often been to win headlines and paint a big flag on the top. In 1997, it was occupied by a squad from Greenpeace as part of its campaign against oil exploration in such vulnerable deep waters.

Below the waves is the Rockall Bank, a massive plateau of volcanic origin, and between this and the edge of Ireland's continental shelf is the basin called the Rockall Trough where winter waves sometimes reach 30 metres. The recent discovery of seabed gas some 125 km off the Donegal coast led to Ireland's current offer of a Rockall Round of exploration licences on the north-east slope of the basin sediments. They are called Frontier Licences, in recognition of the nature of such a deep-sea environment. Like the desperate, probably unsustainable, pursuit of deep-sea fishing, we are pushing the bounds of Earth's exploitable resources.

The unfamiliar names (orange roughy, scabbardfish, round-nosed grenadier, and so on) and even odder appearance of the deep-water fish now targeted by big trawlers, could sometimes make it seem as if they were new discoveries. In fact, the waters west of Ireland were the cradle of deep-sea biology, and research cruises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries described the fish to be found there in considerable detail.

Expeditions funded by the Royal Irish Academy often carried a mixed bag of scientists. My painting of Rockall is taken from an original by William Spotswood Green, sketched from the spray-lashed deckhouse of the steamer in the summer of 1896. Green was a naturalist mad about fish and later led Ireland's pioneer fishery research. His companions on the Rockall voyage (they couldn't land) were leading figures in botany, geology, ornithology, entomology. Even when there wasn't a rock to explore, there were multiple, mutual enthusiasms aboard every marine expedition.

More than a century later, something of the old feeling for the wholeness of nature is forcefully reasserting itself among marine scientists. Despairing of fishery management policies focused solely on the stocks of target fish, they are insisting that the whole ecosystem must be considered, along with all the human impacts on it.

Nowhere does this apply more than in the still, dark depths of the Rockall Trough, where spawning maturity comes very late and where the orange roughy, left alone, can live to an astonishing 187 years. The impact of trawling can be catastrophic far beyond its take of target species. It churns up seabed sediments and smashes corals on sea-mounts. It scoops up masses of unwanted, smaller fish, almost all of which die - yet these are the food of the remaining commercial species. Habitat, biomass and food-chain are all disrupted and diminished in ways that traditional stock assessment quite ignores: TACs - Total Allowable Catches - simply don't work ecologically.

The "ecosystem approach" was the theme of a major Dublin conference in April, organised by ICES, the International Council for Exploration of the Seas - the main adviser to the EU on fish stocks and the marine environment. At a time of a temporary freeze on fishing for deep-sea species in the North-East Atlantic, the government's Marine Institute has not shrunk from introducing the new thinking to Ireland's trawler skippers.

How it is to work in practice will be judged from the management policies that result from a big research project now under way off Ireland's west coast. Led by the Marine Institute and Bord Iascaigh Mhara, it is using echo-sounding techniques to assess stocks of orange roughy that live above hundreds of seamounds located by the National Seabed Survey at the margin of the Irish shelf in the southeast of the Rockall Trough. The project involves scientists from South Africa and New Zealand (which almost extinguished its orange roughy in an initial rush of exploitation). It is meant to offer the EU a plan for "sustainable and responsible exploitation" of this venerable and vulnerable fish.