Corals Nearly as Old as the Pyramids, and the Fight to Save Them

Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, a coral colony has been growing since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished. One deep-water black coral off the coast of Hawaii has been dated at 4,270 years old, making it one of the oldest living skeleton-building organisms known to science. A single pass of a bottom trawl net can wipe out that kind of habitat in seconds, and it's a fight that's still being decided this very year at the United Nations.

In this episode, Andrew breaks down why bottom trawling is such a hard problem to regulate. It's rarely the fish stock itself that takes the worst damage. It's the seafloor habitat those fish depend on to hide, feed, and survive, and that habitat can take centuries to rebuild once it's gone. Andrew traces the policy fight behind this back to a failed 2004 push for an outright ban on high seas bottom trawling, the 2006 compromise that did pass (UN Resolution 61/105), and the recurring cycle of reviews since then that have kept tightening the rules bit by bit.

That fight isn't a closed chapter. A UN preparatory workshop on bottom fishing's impact on vulnerable marine ecosystems was held in July 2026, feeding into a full General Assembly review later this year, with advocates pushing for a firm, time-bound end to seamount trawling on the high seas by 2027. Andrew connects it to Canada's own back-and-forth over fish habitat protection in the Fisheries Act, and sets up Friday's interview with the guest who chaired the UN fisheries negotiations that started this whole process.

Takeaways:

• Some deep-sea corals have been alive for thousands of years, and a single trawl pass can destroy that habitat in seconds.
• Bottom trawling's real damage usually lands on the seafloor habitat fish depend on, not the fish stock itself.
• The landmark 2006 UN resolution on bottom trawling (Resolution 61/105) was a hard-fought compromise reached after an outright ban failed in 2004.
• International ocean policy almost never arrives finished. It gets built in stages and strengthened through repeated review cycles.
• A new UN review is underway in 2026, with advocates pushing for a firm end to seamount bottom trawling by 2027.