Huge problems exist in the global fishing industry today. Despite the social and economic importance of capture fisheries, attempts to exploit marine resources in a sustainable manner have been largely unsuccessful, leading to widespread concerns often accompanied by high-profile media reports, that fishing is causing irreparable damage to the marine environment. There is a growing awareness among Europeans that current fishing methods such as trawls, seines, and nets can be destructive to the marine environment through seabed destruction, bycatch, ghost fishing, and a source of plastic pollution, affecting ecosystems, biodiversity and killing hundreds of thousands of non-target species, including mammals, turtles, and birds.
o Bottom trawling destroys or damage the seafloor habitats, by dragging large heavy nets or other fishing gears across the seafloor, scooping up everything in its path, like centuries-old corals
o Bycatch, or the catch of non-target ocean wildlife, is a consequence of most of current fishing methods and is one of the largest threats to marine ecosystems. It is estimated that 40% of fish catch worldwide is unintentionally caught and is partly thrown back into the sea, either dead or dying
o Abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gears creates two additional problems for marine ecosystems and biodiversity: ghost fishing and plastic pollution
o Plastic waste resulting from abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gears are the main source marine environment pollution, being estimated that as much as 70% (by weight) of microplastics (above 20cm) found floating on the surface of the ocean was fishing related
o In wild capture fisheries, fish are often chased to exhaustion, crushed and raised quickly to air pressure. Fishing practices can also affect fishes that encounter the fishing gear but escape, that take with them injuries that might slowly kill them
o Fishing accounts for 1.2 % of global oil consumption. The energy content of the fuel burned is more than 12 times that of the resulting catch. Thus, it is needed a more efficient and sustainable approach that allows reducing fuel consumption not only by avoiding inefficient trips to the sea, but also by its nature.
The overall objective for the company is to is to develop a disruptive and sustainable fishing concept called InnoCatch which helps to solve the above problems within today’s fisheries. The concept is a combination of method and equipment and consists of the four main components:
1. A proprietary trap-technology, with ground-breaking features and innovative design allowing the traps to be much bigger and still highly collapsible and stackable. These capacities allow for higher catch each trap and a higher number of traps each fishing vessel. This passive method limits seabed destruction and loss of fishing gear.
2. A smart buoy (on the surface) with sensors to define geo position, receive signals from the transducer (subsea) below, measuring biomass in the trap in real-time and identification of gear and fisherman owning it. Used in a responsible manner, the sensor system will be an important device for the mitigation of plastic pollution and ghost fishing.
3. Light attractant attracts krill, copepods and other creatures that is natural pray for fish.
4. Software solution with both front-end for the fishermen and back-end for storage and further analysis of big data. The fishermen will have continuous information about the trap and catch which help them to maximize their ecological and economic efficiency. The position monitoring will further prevent loss of fishing gear. The software will also facilitate for monitoring and surveillance of all gear connected to the platform, which can be of interest also to regulators and other stakeholders interested in such data.
