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“Internet of Things” Solution for Trawl Net Fishermen

January 25, 2017 — It’s an early foggy morning in November off the coast of Oregon. The F/V Seeker is out searching the cold, choppy water for the perfect place to drop its trawl net. This is only going to be a test run for the captain, meant to find out what kind of fish lie in wait below his ship on the ocean’s floor. The captain is noticeably concerned about staying within the strict new regulations and catching only the fish he is permitted to, particularly with a fisheries inspector standing by on board. He’s been worried since the US West Coast adopted an individual boat quota allotment system, which stipulates that each boat has a biomass weight allotment for a given time period for each fishery based on that boat’s historical average yield – the Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ). There are reports that these new regulations are effective in rebuilding some fish stocks, but the stricter regulations are also making it harder for the smaller fleets to stay in business and for the larger fleets to stay profitable. If the captain fails to comply with these regulations, he may be fined, lose his boat or even face criminal charges.

For a small boat like his, the margins are razor thin. An unproductive catch will end up losing him money. Ongoing challenges from the various NOAA “manned observer programs” continue to take their toll on profits and the need for more cost effective measures.

The captain chooses his site carefully, even surveying it with sophisticated side scan sonar, trying to divine whether there’s anything worth fishing for. Sonar, a “ping-back” technology invented in the 1940s, only produces a fuzzy image. It has been slowly becoming more sophisticated but still cannot reliably distinguish between fish species, or even between fish and the ocean floor. Unwilling to rely on just his intuition about what lies below, the captain readies the crew to drop the net for a “test tow”.

Read the full story at Fishermen’s News

Say Goodbye to Bycatch: Fishing Smarter in the 21st Century

November 23, 2015 — Fishing nets are blind. They have been for thousands of years.

Just like our ancestors, today’s commercial fishermen drop their nets, or “trawls”, into dark, opaque waters. What they pull up is anyone’s guess.

In addition to the fish being targeted, their trawls also contain “by-catch”: unintended fish species and ocean wildlife that are tossed back because they cannot be sold. The thing is, by the time the nets are hauled up, most of the by-catch is already dead.

So what’s the problem with catching a few extra fish?

What if I told you that by-catch is a major contributor to overfishing and poses a significant threat to the world’s oceans? Currently, in the United States, approximately 1 in 5 fish caught by commercial fishermen are by-catch. That’s 2 billion pounds of fish and other marine species wasted each year. Imagine inadvertently capturing, killing, and disposing of 4,800 blue whales…what an enormous, destructive waste.

In attempting to solve the by-catch problem, Rob Terry, founder of SmartCatch, asked himself: what if commercial fisheries could see inside their trawls before they reel them in?

In 2014, the Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic (LEX-NG) Fund issued a grant to Rob Terry to develop SmartCatch’s Digital Catch Monitoring System, or DigiCatch for short. With DigiCatch technology, fisherman can reduce by-catch by having eyes underwater to monitor their trawls.

Read the full story at the National Geographic

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