English: Trawling, dredging and pole-and-line: what methods do we use to catch fish?

Say the word ‘fishing’ and very different images come to mind. Some of us might picture a lone fisherman with a wooden fishing rod. Others will picture a 100-meter wide net being dragged along the seafloor by an industrial ship.

There are a variety of ways to catch fish. These matter because they depend on what fish we want to catch; affect how much fish we can catch (and ultimately, the amount of fish we have to eat; and the income fishers get); and what the ecological impacts are.

Discussions on fisheries can be full of jargon. If you’re not familiar with this research, it can be difficult to understand exactly what each method looks like, and what it entails. To make this easier I have created the following visualization, which presents an overview of the most common fishing methods. This is based on summary visuals from the Marine Stewardship Council.

This gear is used across the world, but there are some general patterns to where certain methods are more widely used. Pole-and-line, longline, and gillnet methods are more common in lower-income countries where much of the fishing activity is subsistence or small-scale. Purse seine and trawling methods are more common in industrial fishing practices; these tend to catch more fish per unit of effort. But the downside is that they tend to have larger negative impacts, with more bycatch (catch of fish that are not the target species) and in some cases, damage to the seabed.