Should we still be eating fish?

With over 90 per cent of the biomass in UK waters already gone, and the huge damage caused by many commercial fishing methods, Harry Cockburn asks how can we justify rounding up what remains of sea life?

Supertrawlers can pull hundreds of tonnes of fish out of the sea each day, and with nets up to a mile long, the associated bycatch is of biblical proportions (Getty/iStock)

We cannot easily see the destruction beneath the waves, but our once-abundant oceans are a scene of appalling wreckage.

The dawn of industrial fishing and ecologically destructive techniques such as dredging, bottom trawling and pulse fishing mean we have caught and killed about 90 per cent of the sheer weight of marine life that used to swim in the seas around Britain, according to the Marine Conservation Society.

The organisation is currently calling for a ban on bottom trawling, the main method used for catching fish including cod, haddock, plaice, monkfish, skate, hake and turbot.