Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 250

Five years after Georges Bank, off the coast of New England, was
closed to most forms of commercial fishing, the number of scallops
had risen fourteenfold. Around Lundy Island, mature lobsters trebled
in number within eighteen months of the creation of the reserve. 62
After four years they were five times as abundant as those outside; 63
after five years, six times. 64 Eighteen years after they were first pro-
tected, the combined weight of large predatory fish in the Apo Island
reserve in the Philippines had risen by a factor of seventeen. 65 Bigger
fish produce more eggs, and the quality of the eggs improves as the
parents mature, so more of the offspring are likely to survive. Like the
Kraken in Tennyson's poem, the suppressed life of the sea awaits only
its chance to re-emerge.
Not all missing populations can be restored. Some of the lifeforms
being wrecked by perhaps the most destructive fishing operation of
all - the trawling of the deep seamounts - take thousands of years to
grow. Many of them are endemic, confined to one place. Extinction
there is extinction everywhere. Scientists are also beginning to under-
stand the extent to which some populations of fish are specific to
particular spawning grounds. Like salmon returning to the rivers of
their birth, for example, every population of cod appears to possess
its own migration routes, and travels to particular banks and reefs to
reproduce, following invisible rivers beneath the sea. This could offer
another explanation for the failure of some cod populations to recover
after fishing for them has ceased: if one group has been destroyed,
neighbouring communities are unlikely to fill the gap, just as salmon
born in the River Tweed will not replace the salmon missing from the
Thames. Migrations are led by the bigger, older fish, which are the
first to be exterminated by overfishing.66 66
Nor would it be correct to suggest that reserves are the only neces-
sary measure. There should also be restrictions on the kind of
equipment used in places where fishing continues, on the capacity of
fishing boats and the time they spend at sea and on their freedom to
discard the fish they do not want to keep. The reserves will probably
work best if they are surrounded by zones in which pressure is
reduced: where, for example, only line fishing is allowed. But the
rewilding of parts of the sea is the essential element without which
protection is almost meaningless.