Why You’ll Never Eat Dredged Scallops Again
With the possible exception of dynamite fishing, it would be hard to devise a more effective means of destroying both living creatures and their habitats. Scallop dredges operate by raking through the seabed with long metal teeth, dislodging the shellfish from the sediments and trapping them in a net whose underside is made of chain mail. The teeth rip through any sedentary creatures in their path, as well as the fish, crabs and lobsters unable to escape in time. The steel mesh smashes animals missed by the teeth. Where they are used, divers publish heartbreaking photographs of the seabed before and after they have passed. It looks, where the dredges have worked, like a ploughed field, lifeless, covered in fragments of shell.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Page 252.