Size- and species selection in Danish seine

Abstract

The Norwegian seine fishery has traditionally been performed in relative shallow water close to the coast, and this as inevitable led to a high proportion of small fish in the catches. A work on size selectivity was therefore started in the early 90'ties. Based on earlier expeience with grid in trawls, similar experiment was conducted with seine nets. Grids in seine nets gave selectivity results similar to those obtained for trawl, but grids turned out to be difficult to handle onboard sein net vessels. Further experiments were performed with square mesh codendsm which gave similar good selectivity results. The square mesh size of 125 mm has been used by the seine net fleet in a temporarily basis. In the last few years the net fleet has got problem with bycatch of strict regulated species. A project on species selectivity was initiated some years back in order to sort out unwanted species. With a big meshed horizontal square mesh panel in the extention piece, it is possible to shift the species composition in the codend compared to the normal composition on the fishing ground.