Trawling nets, weighted down with steel balls and chains, lowered into the lightless depths and towed behind ships, scrape and scrawl paths of destruction into the flanks of seamounts.
Of the volume of the planet in which traces of life can be found, something over 90% is deep under water.By virtue of its inaccessibility to man, the deep is as pristine an environment as can be (though scientists trawling 4km down complain of the coke cans and clinker they find everywhere).
Otter trawling occurs down to depths of more than 400 m, whereas beam trawling occurs in water depths down to 100m.
This is down to a trawling ban some years back, so the feeding beds have now recovered.
Brown is standing by his fundraiser who has won plaudits in Downing Street for trawling through Labour's donors to check for skeletons.
That day, he had been trawling with a net nearly two thousand feet down; he decided to bring the net to the surface, and snapped its steel jaws shut.
Fed up with young, unemployed men her own age, Jennifer recently began trawling for a sugar daddy to pay down about $20,000 in student loan debt.
For a couple of years he chased down Blue Velvet leads, trawling inventories of companies that had owned the film before MGM.
Yet even so, after trawling the big four banks, last week the last, Lloyds, turned them down, having at first promised the loan.
There is certainly a separate debate to be had about the extent to which schools have a right to police teachers' extra-curricular behaviour, as well as the violation of teachers' privacy when pupils or parents track down and trawl through their social media accounts.
