This month’s Sidney Award winner, Tom Gogola, wrote about how dysfunctional fishing regulations force commercial fishermen to waste tons of edible bycatch and how new technology is helping to reduce bycatch.

Bycatch is any creature a fisher catches while fishing for something else, edible or not.

In other bycatch news, Cornelia Dean of the New York Times delves deeper into the burgeoning field of anti-bycatch technology.

Dean reports on the work of the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction, a research center administered by the New England Aquarium where fishers and scientists work together to refine fishing gear to reduce bycatch:

The new efforts focus on modifications to fishing gear. They include relatively simple steps, like changes in hook design, and more complex ones: making fishing lines more visible to whales, changing noise levels on fishing boats and impregnating metal gear with substances meant to repel “bycatch species” like sharks.

Engineered bycatch reduction goes back to the 1990s in the Gulf of Maine, where harbor porpoises were turning up in fishermen’s nets. On the theory that porpoises are sensitive to noise, engineers and biologists developed beer-can-size devices that emitted pinging noises underwater. Within weeks of attaching the pingers to their nets, fishermen saw porpoise bycatch drop by 90 percent.

Historically, fishers have suspected that scientists are out of touch with the practical realities of fishing and scientists have countered that fishers are uninterested in conservation and resistant to change. Dean suggests that, in addition to saving innocent sea creatures, joint research efforts like these may ultimately help bridge the cultural gap between the two groups.

[Photo credit: Chris Vees, Creative Commons.]