Shipwrecks on the Dutch Continental Shelf as Artificial Reefs

Abstract

Shipwrecks are known to be places where sport and commercial fishing can yield a good catch; a practical demonstration of the fact that objects deposited in the sea attract a variety of organisms which make use of hard substrata as dwelling places or attachment sites. For example, Hiscock (1980) described hard-substratum communities containing 222 species on a 19 m deep wrecked coaster in the Bristol Channel, UK. Hard substratum in the southern North Sea is mainly limited to man-made structures like wrecks, drilling platforms, pipelines and, along the shore, dyke- slopes and other coastal protection structures (e.g. see Hamer et ai, chapter 24, this volume).