Huge deep-water area off N.S. declared a marine refuge

An area off Nova Scotia's coast nearly four times the size of Cape Breton was declared a marine refuge by Canada on Wednesday — World Oceans Day.

Eastern Canyons Marine Refuge is a 44,000 square kilometre swath of ocean running from the edge of the continental shelf near Sable Island to Canada's exclusive economic zone more than 300 kilometres offshore.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) says Eastern Canyons is home to rare bottlenose whales and cold-water corals .

"One of the largest known [coral] aggregates in Atlantic Canada. You can think of it as akin to an old-growth forest in the sea," says Kristian Curran, DFO regional manager of sustainable harvests for the Maritimes Region.

All bottom-contact fisheries — including trawls, traps, and longlines — will be prohibited inside the marine refuge, with the exception of one fishing zone for smaller vessels that use longlines. It covers about 0.2 per cent of the overall refuge area. All vessels operating in it will be required to have federal at-sea observers on board. 

Creation of the marine refuge will shut down fishing with an average landed value of $700,000 per year in the area, says Curran.

"As a number 700,000 of course is quite large. But when we put it as a percentage of the total landings in landed value from the broader management area [eastern Scotian Shelf] it's quite small on average, maybe five per cent of the total rather comes from Eastern Canyons,' he said.

Environmentalists welcomed one of the largest fisheries closures in eastern Canada.

Fred Whoriskey, a scientist at the Ocean Frontier Institute in Halifax, says Eastern Canyons is a critical habitat for many deep-water species. 

"These deep-water areas are probably extremely important for the function of the ocean ecosystems and we don't understand them very well. So to have one that's protected, that's intact [and] can serve as a natural laboratory is a very, very powerful tool and something that's going to be very good for the ecology of Canada," Whoriskey said.

The area is adjacent to the Gully Marine Protected Area, the first of its kind in Atlantic Canada. Eastern Canyons was proposed for conservation under the Fisheries Act in 2018.

It was criticized by some in Nova Scotia's lucrative halibut fishery which will be blocked from most of the area.

"I don't think too much of it," says Andy Henneberry, of ALS Fisheries in Sambro, N.S. "We're closing a productive area for the fishing fleet, the halibut fishing fleet. The hook and line does very little damage to corals."

Henneberry says the impact of the closure goes beyond the Eastern Canyons Marine Refuge — where catches represent five to eight per cent of the fishery on Easern Scotian Shelf.