A few years ago, regional scientists with New Hampshire Sea Grant created some innovative trawling gear designed to reduce groundfish bycatch. Studying the differences in swimming behavior of both fish and shrimp, they created a “topless” shrimp trawl that allows fish to escape easily. In shallow waters, the design works great, reports David Goethel, a New Hampshire fisherman who has worked with Sea Grant on the gear.
“The shrimp don’t really move, they basically just flop over the sweep and tumble down the neck,” Goethel said. “It removed about 90-odd percent of the herring and it caught more shrimp because the net’s a little bigger.”
Such a design could be a real boon to shrimp fishermen who want to cut groundfish bycatch, but SeaGrant Associate Director Ken La Valley only knows of five shrimp fishermen who have adopted the new gear.
The problem is not the gear’s design, but the recent string of poor shrimp seasons. Because of the reported crash in shrimp stock in the Gulf of Maine, the shrimp season has been cut from several months to several days, and that’s not enough time for most fishermen to adopt a whole new system of gear, La Valley said.
“We’ve had really bad opportunities for many new people to use the topless shrimp trawls,” La Valley said.
The issue is more one of time than investment, La Valley said. It takes a few days to tweak gear to the conditions of the season, and it’s asking a lot of Gulf of Maine shrimp fishermen to use the few precious days they have to tinker with new technology. They are opting instead to adopt new grating systems that allow smaller-sized shrimp to escape and to wait to try out the topless trawling gear.
“I have a list of 10 fishermen that would love to use it,” La Valley said.
In the meantime, scientists are in conversations with other shrimp fisheries, including in Newfoundland, about the possibly of adopting the gear, according to Pegguno He, an associate professor of oceanography at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.