And the software is not only for commercial fishers. The basic premise is that fishermen are hunter-gatherers, so the more selective they can be the better off the environment will be. Bycatch includes any marine life that fisheries are prohibited by law to catch. The commercial fishing industry in the north Pacific throws away nearly one billion pounds of bycatch fish and marine life each year in the process of harvesting groundfish species such as pollock, cod, and yellowfin sole, according to the Alaska Marine Conservation Council. In response to this problem, the Fisheries Management Council of each region enforces strict regulations.
Fisheries have bycatch caps.
You can catch a certain amount and after that you're shut down. Fisheries Management Councils get their information from the National Fishery Service. To predict the total allowable catch, the service performs its own catches to survey catch composition in a particular area. To kill the fish to determine how many there are seems counterproductive, Simpson said. So SciFish created a customized version of the software for the National Fishery Service.