Abstract
Demersal Seining is an active fishing method applying two long seine ropes and a seine net. Demersal seining relies on fish responding to the seine rope as it moves during the fishing process. The seine ropes and net are deployed in a specific pattern encircling an area on the seabed. In some variants of demersal seining the haul-in procedure includes a towing phase where the fishing vessel moves forward before starting to winch in the seine ropes. The initial seine rope encircled area, the gradual change in it during the haul-in process and the fish's reaction to the moving seine ropes play an important role in the catch performance of demersal seine fishing. The current study investigates this subject by applying computer simulation models for demersal seine fishing. The demersal seine fishing is dynamic in nature and therefore a dynamic model, SeineSolver is applied for simulating the physical behaviour of the seine ropes during the fishing process. Information about the seine rope behaviour is used as input to another simulation tool, SeineFish that predicts the catch performance of the demersal seine fishing process. SeineFish implements a simple model for how fish at the seabed reacts to an approaching seine rope. Here, the SeineSolver and SeineFish tools are applied to investigate catching performance for a Norwegian demersal seine fishery targeting cod (Gadus morhua) in the coastal zone. The effect of seine rope layout pattern and the duration of the towing phase are investigated. Among the four different layout patterns investigated, the square layout pattern was predicted to perform best; catching 69%-86% more fish than would be obtained with the rectangular layout pattern. Inclusion of a towing phase in the fishing process was found to increase the catch performance for all layout patterns. For the square layout pattern, inclusion of a towing phase of 15 or 35 minutes increased the catch performance by respectively 37% and 48% compared to fishing without a towing phase. These results highlights the importance of the selected seine rope layout pattern and the duration of the towing phase when fishermen try to maximize the catch performance of their fishery. To our knowledge this is the first time the combination of models for the physical behaviour of seine ropes and for fish behaviour in response to seine rope movements have been applied to predict catch performance for demersal seining.
Highlights
The Danish seining or anchor seining is an active demersal fishing technique which was invented in Denmark and in the first half of the 20th century became one of the most important fishing gears used there [1]
The SeineSolver and SeineFish tools were applied to predict the number of fish encircled during the fishing process for each fishing case
We have investigated how the catch performance for a demersal seine fishing operation may be affected by the initial seine rope layout pattern and by the haul-in procedure
Summary
The Danish seining or anchor seining is an active demersal fishing technique which was invented in Denmark and in the first half of the 20th century became one of the most important fishing gears used there [1]. Scottish fishermen started to fish without anchoring, making it possible to move the vessel forward during hauling and thereby including a towing phase This technique is known as Scottish seining, ‘Fly-dragging’ or ‘Fly-shooting’, and is the method primarily applied by Norwegian fishermen targeting cod (Gadus morhua) and haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) [2]. When the distance between the ropes has decreased to a certain level, the rope drums are activated in order to close the wings fast and to force the last fraction of collected fish into the seine net; the closing phase.
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