Commercial Fishing

Commercial fishing refers to the modern industry of fishing on a mass scale that is responsible for supplying seafood to worldwide markets. As the worldwide demand for healthy seafood increases, much of the commercial fishing industry is caught between meeting the high demand and trying not to fish so excessively so as to severely deplete marine fish populations. Overfishing and the weighty consequences it portends are the most serious issues facing the fishing world today.

Commercial Fishing Boats For Sale

Any commercial fishing operation is collectively referred to as a fishery; this can technically mean any scale of fishing from a one-man fishing boat to a large fishing crew employing mass-fishing techniques such as trawling.

Commercial Fishing Gear

Trawling is one of the simpler and more common techniques used by large-scale fisheries. The basic concept is to drag an enormous fishing net behind one or more fishing boats. The net simply sweeps underwater, trapping anything it comes across that isn’t small enough to swim through the mesh of the net.

Though trawling can offer a high yield of catch, it has been criticized both for the harm it can cause underwater environments as well as its inefficient, unselective manner of catching anything in its path. Untargeted species such as dolphins are endangered by trawling nets, and the heavy, anchored parts of a trawling net can damage seafloor environments and wreck the ecosystems dependent on them. The unwanted catch can also be a hassle for the fishermen who have to rummage through the catch in order to pick out and throw back the undesired animals.

Gillnetting is considered a more efficient means of industrial fishing. Gillnetting involves the use of specialized nets that have very uniform and selectively sized openings in the mesh. The idea is that the desired species of fish will be sized perfectly for the mesh in such a way that when the fish swims into the net, it will swim into the opening far enough that it both cannot swim all the way through and cannot back out as its gills will be caught on the net. It is a more selective way of fishing because smaller fish will simply swim through the netting while larger fish will not squeeze through the netting far enough to get their gills caught on it.

Commercial Fishing History

Despite the improved selectivity of gillnetting over trawling, it still has resulted in the unintended capture of species such as dolphins. For this reason, gillnets have been banned in international waters by the United Nations since 1993.