Non Technical Summary

This review paper gives a potted history of the field of fishing technology and where current and future challenges reside.

Since humans began fishing, fishing technology has developed with the objective of trying to catch the greatest quantities and varieties of fish possible. After millennia of assuming that seafood resources are inexhaustible, and centuries of muted concern that new technologies may have detrimental impacts, the last century has seen fishing technology blamed as a major cause of the current over-exploitation of fish stocks throughout the world.

It has mainly been during the last few decades that fishing technologists have begun to focus on more conservation-orientated goals. This occurred initially in response to concerns over the bycatch of charismatic species (like dolphins in tuna purse-seines) but quickly broadened to the by-catch and discarding of not-so-charismatic species (like juvenile fish killed by prawn trawling). To ameliorate these issues, technologists and fishers developed various innovative gear-based and operational solutions. An incremental framework was followed involving: identification of problems using observer programmes, developing technological solutions to these problems and experimentally testing them, implementing them throughout industry and gaining acceptance of the solutions from interest groups.

Most recently, however, public concern has broadened once again from by-catch issues to impacts of fishing on entire ecosystems; i.e. impacts on all species affected - not just those caught, retained or discarded. Whilst identifying and quantifying such issues are difficult, finding solutions to identified problems is an even greater challenge, particularly for fishing technologists. The easiest solutions to such problems involve management strategies like closures but less extreme alternatives involve developing new technologies that reduce the impacts of fishing on ecosystems - in a similar way to that done to reduce bycatch problems. Innovations like altering ground-chains, footropes, sweeps and trawl doors have been suggested as ways to minimize the environmental damage done by trawling but such research is still very much in its infancy. However, the recent history of fishing technology is chequered with successfully meeting such challenges, giving one confidence that solutions to such issues may eventually be developed. Integral to the success of such work, however, is a corresponding improvement in the adoption of new methods by fishers. As our framework shows, this is best achieved by involving fishers in all aspects of the work.