May 15, 2018 — The North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission plans to discuss and possibly vote on new gear requirements in the shrimp trawl fishery at their quarterly business meeting in New Bern on Wednesday and Thursday.
A three-year study identified four new gear configurations that reduce finfish bycatch by at least 40 percent. The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, NOAA Fisheries and N.C. Sea Grant worked with commercial fishermen and local net makers to test 14 different trawl net configurations.
“Each time that we met, they would define what gears to be tested and, you know, as the three-year process went on, we started seeing some devices that showed more promise and we started focusing our efforts on those type of devices.”
Kevin Brown, gear development biologist with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries says nearly 314,000 pounds of fish and shrimp were sampled during the study.