Down in the deep, dark South Pacific Ocean live grouchy-looking, sluggish fish. Some of them have been around since the Qing Dynasty ruled China and possibly even before the United States was an independent country.

With a life expectancy of up to 250 years , orange roughy live slowly. They reach maturity in their late 20s and early 30s when they can gather and breed mostly on seamounts at depths of 800-1,600 metres.

Their unhurried lifestyle was largely undisturbed until the late 1970s, when humans began catching them with deep-sea trawl gear. Since then, orange roughy numbers have plummeted. Bottom trawling, the primary method for harvesting the species, is infamous for its destructive impacts on seabed communities. It also involves high levels of “bycatch” – the capture of non-targe

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