Fishermen Team Up With Scientists To Make A More Selective Net

Portland's Gulf of Maine Analysis Institute has designed a trawl internet that goals to focus on species that may nonetheless be worthwhile whereas avoiding cod. Courtesy of Gulf of Maine Analysis Institute disguise caption

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Courtesy of Gulf of Maine Analysis Institute

Portland's Gulf of Maine Analysis Institute has designed a trawl internet that goals to focus on species that may nonetheless be worthwhile whereas avoiding cod.

Courtesy of Gulf of Maine Analysis Institute

Some New England fishermen are pinning their hopes on a brand new type of trawl internet getting used within the Gulf of Maine, one which scoops up plentiful flatfish comparable to flounder and sole whereas avoiding species comparable to cod, that are in extreme decline.

For hundreds of years, cod have been plentiful and a primary goal for the Gulf of Maine fleet. However in recent times, catch quotas have been drastically diminished because the variety of cod of reproductive age have dropped perilously low.

For a lot of boats, that turned the previously prized groundfish into undesirable bycatch. And for fishermen, it may be powerful to keep away from cod whereas making an attempt to catch different fish. The stakes are excessive.

"Say tomorrow I'm going out, have a 10,000 set of cod and I solely have four,000 kilos of quota, primarily your sector supervisor — the person who oversees this — would shut me down," says Jim Ford, whose trawler is predicated in Newburyport, Mass.

Not solely that, Ford could be pressured to "lease" cod quota allowances from different fishermen to cowl his overage. The price of such leases, he says, can shortly outweigh the worth of the cod that is inadvertently caught.

"And I might pay a ridiculous worth. And you then're shut down, you'll be able to't even go fishing," he says.

However as an alternative of becoming a member of the rising variety of New England fishermen hanging up their nets, Ford has labored to change the nets themselves. This summer season he joined a net-maker and scientists at Portland's Gulf of Maine Analysis Institute to design a trawl internet that targets worthwhile species whereas avoiding cod.

"I consider the web as a cone of netting being pulled by means of the water and over the ocean mattress," says Steve Eayrs, the GMRI scientist who led the mission.

Eayrs says the standard flattish trawl internet has a gap top of about 6 toes. Flounder, pollock and gray sole all preserve very low to the seabed, whereas cod sometimes swim a couple of toes above. The problem was to design a practical internet with a a lot smaller vertical opening — about 2 toes excessive.

"By lowering the peak of the web and making modifications to the highest panel of the web, we allowed the cod that swim above the seabed to truly swim excessive of the web," he says.

After testing the modified internet in a Newfoundland simulator tank, Ford and Eayrs took it to sea for a real-world trial. For 12 days they fished utilizing each the brand new internet and a standard internet, and the outcomes have been good.

"We have been capable of keep away from round half the cod, in comparison with a standard internet, and nonetheless retain the flatfish. And so for fishermen who're nonetheless being worthwhile, they're nonetheless sustaining their flatfish. They weren't shedding any," Eayrs says.

"We had a very good discount in cod. And we did not lose any on flounders. I might say we have been fairly even on the flounders," Ford says.

He says the ultra-low-opening trawl internet additionally produced much less drag, saving on gas. He preferred it properly sufficient to take it out once more.

GMRI is making three of the modified nets obtainable for fishermen to check out free, an necessary choice when nets can value $10,000 or extra.

This kind of innovation has turn into prevalent over the previous six years, as regulators have deployed a quota system that incessantly modifications its parameters as one species or one other turns into kind of plentiful.

"The Gulf of Maine is actually a portfolio of various species," says Brett Alger, a groundfish coverage analyst on the Larger Atlantic Regional Fisheries Workplace. "There's at all times going to be and at all times needs to be gear improvements, technological advances within the fishery to assist help fishermen attain not solely their fisheries' objectives however their enterprise objectives."

In these exhausting instances, the objectives embrace fundamental survival, for fishermen and fish populations: On the Gulf of Maine Analysis Institute, Eayrs' subsequent problem is to attempt to assist each the gulf ecosystem and its fishermen with an off-bottom trawl that can goal haddock and redfish, whereas avoiding cod and different much less plentiful species.