Loch Alsh in Skye was designated as a Marine Protected Area about 10 years ago. Many similar habitats are susceptible to practices like bottom trawling and scallop dredging and so the UK has lost the vast majority of its biogenic reefs. Loch Alsh has some of the most intact ones remaining.

Bally Philp stores prawns which are delivered to the buyer live. While buyers may value purchasing in a way that protects the environment, ensures the welfare of small communities, and values a high quality product, their options for doing so are scarce.

This starfish and any small amounts of bycatch is returned to the sea when caught by creel fisheries. Bycatch from bottom trawling, however, can be more than 55% of their catch and does not survive.

For every trawler, four to five creel fisherman could be employed with less seabed disturbance and bycatch and any catch from a trawler is worth a quarter as much. Philp says, “You’re forfeiting huge amounts of revenue [and] jobs, [and] you have a far higher ecological impact than is necessary to support those jobs and extract that resource.”

A crew member on Philp's boat resets the creels. Philp says, “We’ve gone from a fishing culture in Scotland where maybe eighty years ago there were 20,000 fisherman catching herring, cod, or those kind of things to now there’s not a single fisherman whose employed in Scotland’s inshore waters who’s actually catching fish.”

Creel fishing frequently attracts seagulls. The limited unnecessary extra catch is returned to the sea by creel fishermen and the vast majority of this marine life survives.

Caitlin Turner, a marine biologist, advocates for healthier seas arguing that trawling and dredging impact larger marine life as well: "If you degrade the habitat then there’s less places for juvenile fish to live and spawn in. This affects the abundance of the animals in the area [and] trickles upwards ... Big fisheries shooting themself in the foot."

Workers on a trawler operating in the North Sea dock the vessel in Fraserburgh, a fishing town in northeastern Scotland. They share that they’re usually at sea for 13 to 15 days and back on land for just one day.

An employee at Keltic Seafare Dingwall, UK takes live prawns received from a sustainable fishery and weighs them before packing them for export. Their seafood services 40% of the Michelin restaurants in London but profitability is still tight. Owner Alasdair Hughson hopes for further marine protection in Scotland's seas.

Extra shells from scallops are stored at Keltic Seafare. Reflecting on the state of the seas before he began working more nomadically, owner and scallop diver Alasdair Hughson says, "Fishers [were at] such a low ebb the stock just wasn’t there. It was gone and it wasn’t regenerating because scallop dredging had altered the habitat to such an extent. Scallops needs something to attach to and if you remove everything that sticks up from the seabed, they’re not going to come back."

Hughson says he's been forced to work nomadically. He has two daughters in Dingwall but usually spends four days a week at sea because many regions closer to the coast have been degraded. He says, "If there was no need to increase the size of vessels and move about and become more nomadic, we would have just stayed the way we were because why wouldn’t you?"

Fish purchased at restaurants on the west coast of Scotland primarily come from either the East Coast or Russian imports. Scotland exports the vast majority of its seafood and imports the majority of what’s eaten because people want cheap fish and chips.

A crew member on Bally Philp's boat puts new bait into the creels before resetting them into the loch.

Philp says, “The inshore archipelagos in the West Coast of Scotland used to be full of fish. We have no commercial fish left inshore at all.”

Communities living in coastal regions of Scotland such as the Isle of Skye are seeing a change in the accessibility of seafood and the livelihood of small-scale fisheries threatened. These are not just problems in Scotland—in England and Europe, the small-scale fleet is declining rapidly as well and trawling is now a global crisis.