Industrial fishing in the deep sea should be banned because it has depleted fish stocks that take longer to recover than other species, according to a paper by an international team of marine scientists.

The article, published in the scientific journal Marine Policy, describes fishing operations that have in recent decades targeted the unregulated high seas after stocks near shore were overfished.

Describing the open ocean as "more akin to a watery desert," the scientists argue that vessels have targeted patches of productive areas sequentially, depleting the fish there and destroying deep-sea corals before moving on to new areas.

Certain deep-sea species have gained widespread popularity — including orange roughy and Patagonian toothfish, otherwise known as Chilean sea bass — only to crash within years.

Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Institute and the paper's lead author, said the world has turned to deep-sea fishing "out of desperation" without realizing fish stocks there take much longer to recover.

"We're now fishing in the worst places to fish," Norse said. "These things don't come back."

As vessels use Global Positioning System devices and trawlers, which scrape massive metal plates across the sea bottom, the catch of deep-water species has increased sevenfold between 1960 and 2004, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

"What they're doing out there is more like mining than fishing," said Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Bottom-trawling can crush deep-sea corals that can live for as long as 4,000 years, the scientists noted. Some fish species of the deep live for more than a century, and while they can spawn many eggs, there can be several years in which juveniles fail to make it into adulthood. Orange roughy, which Australia declared a threatened species in 2006, take 30 years to reach sexual maturity and live up to 125 years.

Ray Hilborn, a University of Washington professor of aquatic and fisheries science, questioned the paper on the grounds that several long-lived species off the Pacific Coast, such as geoduck clams, have been harvested sustainably at very low levels. In many cases, fishing operations take just 1 percent of the population, he said, and this keeps the stocks from collapsing.

Hilborn said that while deep-sea corals might be sacrificed in the pursuit of fishing, humans had accepted similar trade-offs when clearing old-growth forests for farmland. "Some of these habitats will probably be changed by fishing. Some of those corals will be gone," he said. "From a conservation perspective, maybe we shouldn't fish at all, and the ocean should be left pristine. Where is the food going to come from?"

But Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, said the costs of deep-sea fishing far outweigh the benefits.

"It's a waste of resources; it's a waste of biodiversity; it's a waste of everything," Pauly said. "In the end, there is nothing left."