The Problem: Overfishing and Bycatch
Fish has been a staple in the diets of most cultures for thousands of years; it’s been sliced and eaten raw in sashimi, grilled and seasoned a la plancha, bread-crumbed and fried for fish fingers, and simply stewed.
But our appetite for fish means we’re currently eating more than ever before. Since the 1950s global fish consumption has doubled, both in developed and emerging economies. A stomach turning 90 per cent of the world’s fish are threatened by overfishing.
The tool of choice for a fisherman is and always has been the humble fishing net — a cheap and simple way of catching as many fish as possible, using as little effort as possible. They have remained technologically unchanged for thousands of years and are used by everyone from riverbank hunter-gatherers to mid-Atlantic trawlers.
Most fishermen and women would think that a net that lets two thirds of the fish it scoops up escape has a major design flaw. But Dan Watson, the inventor of Safety Net, a net which does precisely that, disagrees.
The then master’s student at the Glasgow School of Art, had grown frustrated by the problem of overfishing. Looking further into the issue he realised that the Norwegian national government had introduced a new campaign of measures that were designed to “teach a man to fish, better”.
“Bycatch” was the key problem they wanted to solve. Catching fish which never make it to a supermarket is one of the largest contributors to overfishing. “Bycatch”, the industry term for marine life caught in nets while fishing, is thrown back into the sea, killing the fish in the process. Norway made throwing back endangered species like Cod illegal and has pushed for an EU-wide ban on the practice.
It was this that led Dan to question if technology could offer an alternative solution to the political ‘carrot and stick’ — or perhaps ‘bait and rod’ — approach.
He wondered whether new net-tech could facilitate more ‘selective fishing’ — at that time unchartered territory for the industry — could nets themselves be “fish better”.
The Solution: Don’t fish less, fish smarter
“It was the total opposite of what everyone else was doing at the time. When I’d say to fishermen: ‘Here’s a new net which will help to let fish get away’ they just thought I was totally wrong,” Dan jokes.
He decided to start researching a simple, but unusual, question: What stimulates a fish? If he could lure certain fish into his net and drive others away from it he could begin to make nets more discerning. This gave Dan his ‘lightbulb’ moment when he discovered that made different species of fish reacted differently to light.
“We now build sophisticated LED systems that enable experimentation into how light can segregate ages and species of fish. We then apply this knowledge to create simple sets of lights that help commercial crews catch the right fish,” says Dan.
Safety Net Technologies are now working on the latest iteration of their PISCES device. It has been tested around the world, taking park in research projects in the US and Faro, Portugal.
“That’s the thing about wrong thinking,” explains Dan. “When I was struggling with how to test it my friend asked me if ‘I’d actually just put it in the water?’ Of course, I hadn’t but when I did, I actually started to solve problems. It may be called wrong thinking, but sometimes it’s really about wrongdoing.”
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