Slashdot Mirror
Digital Camera Could Help Sort Fish, Save Stocks
MountainSplash writes "PlanetArk.com is carrying a story about a new camera that "takes a digital photograph of the catch which is then divided into a grid, allowing a computer to measure the shape and color of each fish in the grid. It needs one tenth of a second and identifies 98 percent of fish correctly." The claim is that fish can then be culled quicker possibly increasing the likelyhood of survival for the incidental catch in the net. Testing is being done by Norway's Institute of Marine Research and Norwegian marine electronics maker Scantrol. Onboard testing has proven highly successful, but underwater attempts still need more work. With everything we have all been seeing computers do the last few years, I personally found this to be one of the more interesting of late."
Somehow I doubt that there will be much of a migration into any kind of system such as this. A large proportion of the fishing industry uses as little technology as possible as break-downs cannot be repaired until the ship returns to port, maybe not until after then. That would mean a large amount of losses for a fishing company. There is no point over complicating things that can be achieved simpily.
...but I seriously doubt that the fishing industry will adopt this without legislative mandate. What happens now is that when fisherman haul in a catch, they sort out all prohibited/undersireable fish. They throw overboard that bycatch regardless is the fish are alive or dead. There is no record of what their bycatch was and they suffer no consequences for this bycatch. With this system, there is now a record of the bycatch and it will provide empirical proof of the bycatch problem and therefore ammo to those looking to clean up the fishing industry.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Don't forget that quick sorting is only part of the problem, not the whole thing. Another important factor is that fish are wounded/damaged by the nets even if they are smaller than the holes, they lose scales and the wounds get infected (hence they end up dying anyway). This has been somewhat improved with modern nets but still needs work.
Anyway, props to them with this new system. Despite what the tree-huggers may say, we need the fishing industry to feed ourselves, and the better we can catch the appropiate fish while leaving the rest undisturbed, the better.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
so what is the big deal; now you can verify what you knew was happening anyway? maybe if the camera had a robotic arm that yanked the offender out of the net and put it directly in my can of "Chicken of the Sea"...
stop being so fucking greedy with your satellite fish finders and 5 mile fishing nets
i have absolutely no sympathy for industries that through only their own greed and short term stupidity put themselves out of buisness, fishing had survived for thousands of years till fish finders,5 mile nets, 10000 ton ships etc etc, you don't have to be a fucking genius to work out their real problems are, and they think taking pictures will help them
the phrase "did they really think it would last forever"
comes to mind
of course greed is the behaviour mankind will realise is wrong after we have pissed away all earths natural resources and we are left sitting on a dust ball wondering what happened
A>S
Drastically reduce commercial fishing, if it cannot be eliminated altogether.
This isn't just another vegetarian / vegan rant. I've nothing against anybody eating all the beef, lamb, pork and so on they want. Or even a few fish, if they caught them themselves. But commercial fishing is ruining the sea.
Land meat is generally farmed. That is, for every pig that gets turned into sausages, at least one pig is raised to replace it. {The exception is game, but we can assume due to its comparative rarity from the dinner table that humans accounts for a tolerable proportion of predation of such species. The same would apply to fish if commercial fishing were reduced or eliminated} This is merely a consequence of private ownership of land; but it is a happy one.
When someone takes a fish out of the ocean, what steps do they take to ensure that another fish will replace it? Even the most hardened capitalist can see that privatising the oceans is never going to work.
Land meat is usually slaughtered quickly. This is a pragmatic, rather than strictly humane, requirement -- you generally don't want to annoy a pig or cow, lest it attempt to retaliate with the full force of its fight-or-flight response adrenalin rush; but the consequences are, again, fortunate.
And yet there are still people who claim they are "vegetarians"; yet they persist in eating fish, which have spent their lives ingesting toxic heavy metals which their bodies cannot excrete, died slowly of suffocation on the deck of a trawler, and not been replaced to ensure a supply for future generations.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!