"Industrial fisheries are now going thousands of miles, thousands of feet deep and catching things that live hundreds of years in the process," said Elliott Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute.

Boats operating beyond the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zones of coastal countries were virtually unregulated, the statement released at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting said.

"Here fishing fleets operate like roving bandits, using state-of-the-art technologies to plunder the depths," it added.

The statement said deep-water trawlers could destroy in a matter of hours coral and sponge beds that have taken centuries or millennia to grow.

Long-lived, slow-growing and late-maturing fish such as orange roughy and sharks were being devastated by the practice, experts said.

"The unregulated catches by these roving bandits are utterly unsustainable," says Robert Steneck, of the University of Maine.

"While it may be a good short-term business practice to fish out stocks and move on, we now see global declines of targeted species," Steneck said.

However the practice would be unsustainable without government subsidies to the deep-water fishing companies.

Rashid Sumaila and Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, said around 152 million US dollars was paid annually to meet the fishing companies' fuel costs.

Without that money, the global deep-sea fishing industry would operate at a loss of 50 million, they said.

"Eliminating global subsidies would render these fleets economically unviable and would relieve tremendous pressure on over-fishing and vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems," said Sumaila.

Pauly said the subsidies also meant deep-sea fisheries tended to ignore signs that stocks were being depleted or exhausted.

"You get a signal from the stock: 'I am old, I am rare and I am depleted'," said Pauly. "Subsidies allow you to overlook that signal and keep on fishing to the end."

Experts say industrial trawlers are dragging the sea floor at depths of more than a mile. Super trawlers over 180 meters (600 feet) in length are fitted with flash freezers and fuel tanks that allow them to stay at sea for months on end, fishing swathes of ocean to depletion, before moving on.

Steneck said the answer to the crisis was to replenish fish stocks in already denuded shallower waters.

"The solution is not going into the deep sea, but better managing the shallow waters where fish live fast and die young but ecosystems have a greater potential for resilience," he said.

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