Tag Archives: “The Topless Trawl
How warming ocean temperatures wiped out Maine’s shrimp industry
Since 2014 fishing for northern shrimp has been banned in the United States. The stock in our area has decreased to the point where they are not reproducing. This is not due to overfishing; it is directly due to the temperature of the water. They have simply moved north to colder Canadian waters. Back in 2007, when there was a robust northern shrimp fishery in the Gulf of Maine, scientists were looking for net modifications that would catch shrimp but not have any bycatch of finfish. Since shrimp fisheries throughout the world have some of the highest bycatch of any fishery, this was a priority worldwide. At that time the Northeast Consortium at the University of New Hampshire helped fund research by Dr. Pingguo. He and David Goethel developed a trawl net, named “The Topless Trawl,” that drastically reduced bycatch in the northern shrimp fishery. >click to read< 10:21
