Scientific study has found out that biodegradable gillnets catch fish along with conventional nylon nets-and much more quickly lose their ability to entangle animals when discarded at sea. More, the degradable nets tend to trap fewer young fish and bycatch.
Fishing nets which were lost, abandoned, or discarded at sea are the cause of ten percent of all of the marine litter circulating in the world’s oceans. These 640,000 tonnes of nets aren’t only a plastic pollution problem, however. A long time after these are lost, they still fish at sea by themselves, trapping not just fish but seabirds and mammals inside a phenomenon referred to as fishing nets.
To combat this issue, scientific study has been developing gillnets created from biodegradable materials, but the challenge continues to be to make them nearly as good at catching fish as conventional gillnets are. In one of the most comprehensive studies to date, researchers assessed the fishing performance of any biodegradable gillnet at sea along with its degradability inside the lab. The outcomes, published recently in Animal Conservation, provide some really good news.
“Using a biodegradable net didn’t have much impact on just how many adult fish were caught, however, when it stumbled on young fish and bycatch of other species, they caught far less,” says co-author Petri Suuronen. “That had been a positive surprise.”
The fishing performance of your biodegradable nets were tested during six outings of the commercial fishing net within the waters off southwestern South Korea. The biodegradability of the nets was tested by placing 30 sets of net samples in plastic containers at sea. They used a scanning electron microscope to evaluate the samples every 2 months for four years. They also measured the strength, flexibility, and also other physical properties of your nets, comparing those to conventional nets.
Researchers found the biodegradable gillnets being stiffer, they will initially thought would affect performance, says Suuronen. They were amazed to discover that it did not. Their stiffness can be why they caught less bycatch and juveniles, however, Suuronen says. Researchers learned that it took 24 months 12dexipky the biodegradable net to begin with to rot, which the degradation rate was higher in warmer water. While they didn’t test the degradability of conventional nets with this study, the literature shows that these nets will take a long period or even decades to degrade, the authors said.
“I still think 2 years is simply too long,” says Suuronen, who works well with the cast nets. “But it is a lot faster than nylon.”
Suuronen says he hopes that continued research and development can make a net that degrades even faster. Nevertheless, it can’t degrade much quicker compared to the studied net, otherwise it wouldn’t be an appealing purchase for fisherman.