Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: A net win: Recycling company works with New Bedford fisheries to repurpose their old gear

January 24, 2023 — When you love what you do, as is case for Caitlin Townsend, advocating for fishermen by collecting old fishing nets, ropes and other gear in New Bedford so it can be recycled feels like a dream job.

“If I knew that this was a job option when I was a kid, I would have said this is my dream job, because it is something I am so extremely passionate about,” she said.

It may not sound like everyone’s dream job, but Townsend feels she’s making a difference working for Net Your Problem, a fishing gear recycling service doing its part for the fishing industry as the Massachusetts representative.

“My dad taught me so much as a kid,” she said. “I learned from him that fishermen love the ocean more than anywhere and they would do anything to continue to fish. So programs like this and our business can really help people be able to continue to fish,” said Townsend, a resident of Truro.

Her father, Chris Townsend, fishes out of Provincetown, and she still fishes with him as much as she can. When she was a teenager, she fished full-time with him as his deckhand.

Read the full article at Standard-Times

Meet SharkGuard, a tiny electric field that protects sharks from fishing nets

November 22, 2022 — Millions of sharks, rays, and skates are accidentally killed every year as bycatch within the global fishing industry—an especially staggering number when considering that a quarter of all those species are currently considered endangered. Previously, fishers could do very little to discourage the predators from going after the longline bait meant for intended targets like tuna, but a simple and ingenious new technology is showing huge promise in finally changing course. Highlighted via a study published earlier today in Current Biology, a small device dubbed SharkGuard recently decreased the number of unintended shark catches by as much as 90 percent through exploiting one of the animals’ most impressive senses.

Read the full article at Popular Science

Ban on use of destructive net fails to make an impact in Indonesia, experts say

July 20, 2022 — A year after it was introduced as a replacement for a type of fishing net long seen as unsustainable, the square-mesh seine net has prompted concerns from fisheries experts in Indonesia.

The jaring tarik berkantong net was meant to be the less-destructive successor to the widely used cantrang net, which the Indonesian fisheries ministry effectively banned in July 2021. On paper, there are clear differences between the two: the jaring tarik berkantong has a square-shaped mesh, with a mesh size of 5 centimeters (2 inches), making it less likely for baby fish to be caught than in the diamond-meshed cantrang, with a mesh size of 2.5 cm (1 in).

In the year since the change was imposed, reports have been published and submitted to the fisheries ministry about violations related to the use of both cantrang and its replacement. In a recent interview with Mongabay, Oktavianto said the only difference between cantrang and jaring tarik berkantong is the shape of the mesh. In practice, both nets are dragged close to the seafloor, similar to trawling — a practice that’s prohibited in Indonesia, Oktavainto noted.

The ban was initially imposed in 2015 by Susi Pudjiastuti, the fisheries minister at the time, who blamed the net for depleting fish populations at unsustainable rates and destroying coral reefs when it snagged on them. But the ban faced a massive pushback from fishing communities on the north coast of Java, a region known as Pantura on Indonesia’s most populous island. These fishers have traditionally used cantrang in the Java Sea, and they historically represent a sizable voting bloc, making the cantrang ban a loaded political issue. In response, the fisheries ministry exempted the Pantura fishers from the ban and gave them a three-year grace period to give up their cantrang nets.

However, the ban was officially lifted in November 2020 by Edhy Prabowo, who replaced Susi as the fisheries minister, citing efforts to boost catches and in turn attract greater investment in Indonesia’s marine capture fishery. (Edhy was arrested a week later on unrelated corruption charges and was later sentenced to nine years in jail.)

Read the full at Mongabay

Federal Regulators Conduct Fishing Net Testing for Flounder

September 15, 2017 — WASHINGTON — A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research project in the Northeast was recently conducted to test the efficiency of different sweep types of fishing nets.

The team targeted summer flounder from Long Island to Nantucket and red hake in the western Gulf of Maine off Cape Ann.

Preliminary results show that smaller fish were caught more often using a chain sweep.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

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