Source: The Sunday Post
Author: Krissy Storrar
The beds beneath our seas plays a vital role in Scotland’s marine ecosystem and provides vital habitats for young fish and can soak up carbon from the atmosphere.
Flame shell reefs, seagrass meadows, mud and maerl beds – a seaweed which grows at a rate of just a millimetre a year – all have key roles in the biodiversity of coastal waters.
But the seabed is fragile and has been left badly damaged by decades of bottom trawling – particularly scallop dredging – since a century of restrictions were lifted in 1984.
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