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New fishing methods may save coral beds

December 13th 2007 18:34
Mussels cooked open
Thank God!

This welcome post on the Economist website offers some hope for those of us that love shellfish, but feel guilty about the savage method that fishermen use to pull up the delicious mussels.

Trawling and dredging are two common forms of capturing shellfish. From the article:


"Trawling is the most widespread form of fishing. But bottom trawling is brutal. It uses an enormous, toothed bar mounted on a device called a dredge to scrape the seabed. Dredging throws the intended catch up into a cloud that is captured by a net trailing behind."

What?!?

It sounds barbaric, doesn't it? We're basically smashing the ocean floor, then raking it all up, or sucking it into a net.

It's similar to taking a big, goblin-driven blimp over the forests of Canada, dropping huge metal anchors, then dragging them across the land, scarring the terrain, then picking out the berries to eat.

The current methods of collecting shellfish are horribly invasive, destroying coral beds and sponges, which form the happy habitat of our beautifully coloured fish.

Those clever fiends at MIT have hit onto something new: a scallop trawler that can collect scallops without having to wreck the ocean floor:

"The dredge has several hemispheric scoops in place of the toothed bar. As it is pulled along, the scoops direct water downward. That creates a series of gentle jets that can shuffle the scallops from their resting places—but the streams of water are not powerful enough to damage the benthic zone's long-term tenants. And the scoops swivel out of the way if they encounter anything solid, so the dredge does not destroy such protuberances. Best of all, from the fisherman's point of view, it takes less effort to float a dredge on water jets than it does to drag it across the uneven surface of the seabed. That makes Dr Goudey's new device a more fuel-efficient way to fish than the traditional method."


Fuel-efficient and considerate towards the coral... that's thinking that I like!

* this image is from the Wikipedia page on Mussels.


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