Not all trawling is created equal -- the safest trawl types remove six percent of animal and plant life on the seabed, whereas most methods remove closer to 33 percent.
A study, led by the UK's Bangor University and published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at 70 previous studies of bottom trawling, mostly in the eastern US and western Europe.
It looked at four techniques, including otter trawling, beam trawls, towed dredges and hydraulic dredges.
Otter trawls penetrated the seabed 2.4 cm and caused the least disruption to marine life, the study found, whereas hydraulic dredges penetrated the seabed 16.1 cm and removed 41 percent of the biota each time it passed.
"These findings fill an essential science gap that will inform policy and management strategies for sustainable fishing practices by enabling us to evaluate the trade-off between fish production for food and the environmental cost of different harvesting techniques," said University of Washington Fisheries Professor Ray Hilborn, who co-authored the study.
"There's a common perception that you trawl the bottom and the ecosystem is destroyed," he said.
"This study shows that the most common kind of trawling, otter trawling, does not destroy the marine ecosystem and places that are trawled once a year really won't be very different from places that are not trawled at all."
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