Capture gear
Purse-Seine Net
Catching entire schools at once
What it is
A vessel encircles a school with a long wall of net, then draws the bottom shut like a purse. The net is hauled in until the fish are packed together against the side of the boat.
Where it sits in the system
One set takes a whole school, which is why the gear is used so widely for tuna, sardine, mackerel, and other pelagic fish. Volume per set is the whole logic of the method.
Welfare concern
Fish are crowded and compressed against each other and the net, lose scales, and exhaust themselves, then face air exposure and a delayed death after capture. Animals the boat was not fishing for come up in the same net.
Worth being precise about
A purse seine does not scrape the seabed the way a bottom trawl does. How much bycatch a set takes varies with the target species, the location, and whether fish-aggregating devices are used.
