NOAA Fisheries says a new, innovative net design will help the agency improve and streamline its fisheries surveys along the West Coast.
Developed together with Ocean Gold Seafoods and Seattle-based net manufacturer Swan Nets, the Multi-Function Trawl net allows NOAA research vessels to harvest fish at different depths. That enables a research vessel to set the net for midwater depths to catch Pacific hake during the day, and then adjust the net for surface level trawling to catch sardines and anchovies at night.
"The collaborative learning with industry partners was vital for the success of our initial testing, which brings us much closer to upgrading our survey equipment to use the latest technologies," Southwest Fisheries Science Center Fisheries Resources Division Director Annie Yau said.
The development will allow NOAA Fisheries to combine two surveys that cover roughly the same area: the Coastal Pelagic Species (CPS) Survey and the Joint U.S.-Canada Integrated Ecosystem and Pacific Hake Acoustic Trawl Survey. The agency will replace those individual efforts, which required two separate NOAA research vessels, with the Integrated West Coast Pelagics Survey, which will use a single NOAA vessel with the new net.
NOAA Fisheries said it was forced to find a new solution for the two surveys as the current NOAA Fisheries research vessels being used for them will need repairs beginning in late 2025. In addition to using the Multi-Function Trawl net, the agency may use charter vessels, autonomous platforms, and coordinating vessels from Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Pesca to meet the needs of the West Coast Pelagics Survey.
NOAA Fisheries has been working to reprioritize its surveys and adopt new technologies to better monitor fish stocks in a changing ocean.
Agency scientists have been conducting tests with the Multi-Function Trawl net since late 2023, fine-tuning deployment of the net.
“We pretty quickly came up to speed, and the operations thus far have been impressively smooth,” Southwest Fisheries Science Center Research Scientist Josiah Renfree said in a statement. “But we’ll only continue to improve, and the data is coming in, which will help us to further evaluate the net’s performance.”
The gear was trialed by the NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada during its Pacific hake survey over the summer in cooperation with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and by the NOAA Ship Reuben Lasker during the Coastal Pelagic Species Survey. The net system incorporates multiple sensors that allow scientists to monitor the net’s performance in real-time as well as underwater cameras that researchers can review after a survey.
The net was developed using funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided USD 107.5 million (EUR 102.5 million) for NOAA Fisheries’ essential data acquisition efforts.
