One of the longest living fish in the deep sea. The smooth oreo can survive for nearly a century. It grows at an incredibly slow pace. A fish that reaches eighty years old. It was born when the world was a very different place. The smooth, scale-less skin gives it its common name. Large dark spots mark the body. The appearance is distinct. The texture is unique. It lives in the cold dark waters around seamounts. It gathers in dense schools. This behaviour has made it vulnerable to bottom trawling. A fish that likes company. It crowds together on underwater mountains where the current brings food. That schooling habit is useful for finding mates. It helps avoid predators. But it becomes a liability when the trawl nets arrive. Safety in numbers becomes danger in numbers. The aggregation is a trap. The net does not discriminate. It takes the school. All of it. The firm white flesh is valued in the seafood trade. It sits alongside the black oreo. Several oreo species live in New Zealand waters. All have similar slow-growing life histories. All are vulnerable. All are long-lived. All are at risk from deep-sea trawling. The pattern is consistent. The biology is shared. The threat is uniform. The industry targets them all. The market demands them all. The consequence is depletion. Population declines have occurred on heavily fished seamounts. The species is still common on unfished or protected seamounts. That is the pattern. Fish the seamount and the oreos disappear. Leave it alone and they persist. The correlation is direct. The cause is obvious. The solution is simple. But the economic pressure is strong. The protection is partial. The recovery is slow. Recovery may take many decades. A near-century of life. A schooling habit. A vulnerability to nets. The smooth oreo has lived through wars and inventions and climate change. But the trawlers are something else entirely. A fish that has seen a hundred years of human history. Then it dies in a net. The irony is sharp. The longevity is irrelevant. The technology is immediate. The end is sudden. The Māori name is not recorded. It lives too deep for traditional fishing. It is a modern discovery. A deep-sea centenarian. A fish that has been swimming in the dark while empires rose and fell. The obscurity was protection. Now it is exposure. The depth no longer saves it. The gear reaches down. The light finds it. The net captures it. That is the smooth oreo. A near-century of life. A schooling habit. A vulnerability to nets. A fish that has seen too much. It cannot outrun the trawlers. The speed is mismatched. The endurance is futile. It carries on. Until it does not.