FISHING TECHNOLOGIES

      In most modern, commercial fishing fleets the most common fishing vessel is the trawler, equipped with a diesel engine and outfitted with a variety of equipment for fish finding and capturing. Factory ships are huge, operated by crews of 500 to 650 and accompanied by their own fleets of smaller ships called catcher boats. Some factory ships can remain at sea for months at a time and can process and store huge amounts of catch. Nations engaged in large-scale, distant-water fishing operate factory ships. Some of these nations have invested heavily in many of the factory ships owned by U.S. firms. Coastal fleets commonly use smaller vessels that deliver their catch to processing plants on shore.

      Sophisticated electronic equipment, such as sonar, is used to detect the presence of fish schools and to verify water depths and the roughness on the ocean bottom. Airplanes and helicopters scout scattered schools of pelagic fish.

   Fish Harvesting

      The standard methods of catching fish involve either nets, hooked lines, or traps. Pelagic fish are most often harvested using purse seine nets, which are set in a wide circle around the school of fish and then closed and drawn up. Straight drift or gill nets - whose mesh is just large enough to allow the heads of fish to pass through while trapping them at their gills - are used to catch salmon, tuna, cod, and other fish. Demersal fish may be caught in otter trawl nets pulled along the ocean bottom or netted with beam trawls that are used in more shallow waters, mainly for shrimp.

      In halibut fishing, hooked groundlines, called long lines, may reach lengths of many miles, with baited hooks attached at intervals of 6 to 9 m. Floating long lines are used primarily in tuna and salmon fishing, and so are trolling lines, shorter lines towed behind a moving boat. Lights may be lowered into fresh waters to attract fish, which are then sucked up into the ship by vacuum pumps.

      Beginning in the early 1980s, Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean fishing fleets began to use a new fishing technique to make large-scale squid catches in the North Pacific. Huge, 15m deep drift nets made of unbreakable nylon, each stretching 90 m, were lowered off the boats each evening. Together, the nets from a single boat formed a great wall just under the surface of the ocean. The nets drifted all night, catching any sea creatures that happened to swim into their meshes - not only the squid, but amounts of other fish and ocean mammals such as dolphins and seals. Drift-net assemblies began to be used to make catches of other commercial fish in addition to squid. The accidental catch, called "by-catch" in the trade, was thrown away. Large-scale drift-net fishing declined after a UN resolution that went into effect in 1993.

   Fish Processing

      Fishing vessels that make their catches close to port store fish in crushed ice or in refrigerated sea water. Large fishing vessels on long trips are equipped to keep their catch edible by storing it in refrigerated facilities or by quick-freezing it. A fully equipped factory ship will also have machinery on board for fish filleting and freezing or canning. Fish fillets are frozen at sea into large blocks weighing up to 45 kg, these are later reprocessed on shore into individual portions. Some ships may also have facilities for drying and grinding fish into fish meal.

MAJOR FISHING COUNTRIES

      By the early 1990s, China had emerged as the nation with the largest fish catches, totalling  16.5 million US tons in 1992. The Chinese catch is largely from fish farming.  Japan is second, with about 9.4 million US tons. Peru is next, with a catch of 7.5 million US tons. Chile, Russia, and the United States follow, in that order. India, with a catch of 4.6 million US tons, is the seventh-largest fishing nation. The Pacific countries of Indonesia, Thailand, and South Korea complete the list of the ten main fishing nations. Britain, once a major fishing country, is now only a minor player, having caught only 895,000 US tons in 1992.

OVER-FISHED FISHERIES

      In 1948 the total world fish catch was about 19 million metric tons. The total catch rose to over 60 million metric tons by 1970, almost 77 million metric tons in 1972, and in 1989 - a record year - over 110.2 million US tons. The 1992 total was 108 million US tons. Despite the huge size of total world catches, fisheries scientists believe that the sustainable limits to the landings of many important commercial species of marine fish were reached long ago. Decreasing catches of valuable fish, such as cod and haddock, were payed for by capturing less desirable species that would have been thrown out in the past - pollock, pilchard, whiting.

      In 1994 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) announced that 13 of the world's 17 major ocean fisheries are overfished. Overfishing, the harvesting of a species to a point where it can't reproduce itself in serious numbers, is in large part responsible for the decline of cod, haddock, halibut, herring, several species of tuna, and whale. Not enough of these fish remain in the seas to maintain spawning stocks; the fishing industry has been consuming its capital.

      Technology is one reason for the huge increase in fish landings since the 1960s. Catches were so rich that private industry and governments both poured money into higher quality fishing fleets. Since the 1980s, for example, the European Union quadrupled its support for fishing, subsidizing the building of new boats and arranging for member countries to exploit fishing grounds in other members' jurisdictions. Since 1975, the number of trawlers on the high seas has increased by 30 percent, and the major fishing nations now suffer from overcapacity: the European Union could land its present catches with only half its present fleet.