The Good 5 Cent Cigar

Issue date: 12/4/07 Section: Campus

Media Credit: Photo courtesy of URI Communications Department Members of the University of Rhode Island crew aboard the F/V Iron work on the "Eliminator"trawl.

12/04/07 - A team of University of Rhode Island Fisheries Center researchers and Rhode Island Sea Grant Sustainable Fisheries Extension staff was awarded a $30,000 prize this year from the World Wildlife Fund for its new bottom-trawling net that traps only certain species of fish.

Aptly named, "The Eliminator" won first place in the WWF's International Smart Gear Competition designed at motivating research that reduces the amount of unwanted species of fish killed and discarded, or "bycatch."

"Bycatch is environmental and economic problem," Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of the World Wildlife Fund, said in a WWF press release. "These inventions have shown to be effective solutions in our efforts to make fishing 'smarter' and we're pleased to honor their creators."

Not only is the new eliminator cost effective, but it also works on a very simple mechanism that utilizes a specific observation of fish behavior. The Eliminator bases its effectiveness off the actions of haddock and several other species of bottom-dwelling fish, which swim upward when threatened by an approaching trawler.

The Eliminator net is designed to trap only certain types of fish, either haddock or pollock, which in Rhode Island are not considered a "stock of concern," negating the need for fishing regulation. The bottom of the net's mesh has eight-foot-wide holes to allow other marine life to escape, greatly reducing the chance of accidentally catching unwanted fish that would be discarded later.

"The goal of the whole project was develop a net that allows fishermen to work on days they couldn't normally work because of fishers' management regulation," said Dave Beutel, a researcher at the University of Rhode Island Fisheries Center. "On certain days, fishermen are not allowed to fish if what is called a stock of concern could be caught as bycatch. The eliminator has been proven to not only reduce the amount of all bycatch, but allows fishermen using it to fish on days that other fishermen using other nets would not be able to legally."

According to the WWF, millions of tons of fish and hundreds of thousands of marine animals are killed each year through destructive fishing practices. The

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