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Fishing Nets, with Special Reference to the Otter-trawl. 



By 

 H. M. Kyle, M.A., D.Sc. 



(With Plates I. and II.) 



The increased attention which has been paid within recent years to 

 fishery statistics has revealed, amongst other troublesome things, that 

 the instruments employed play an important part both as to quantity 

 and quality in the result. It is not necessary to discuss whether any 

 of the instruments as now used give a fair sample of the contents of 

 the water or ground, but it certainly is the case that different apparatus 

 will give different samples. Let a beam-trawl and an otter-trawl work 

 for a year over the same ground alongside drift-nets and fixed trammel- 

 nets or gill-nets, and we can guarantee that the results will differ 

 from one another. In the case of the drift-nets we should have a few 

 forms probably in large quantity, in the others a great variety of forms, 

 but in different proportions in each. And again, those obtained by the 

 drift-nets would be practically absent from the trawls. It thus behoves 

 the naturalist to make every kind of fishing apparatus subservient 

 to his use, if he desires to obtain even an approximate measure of 

 fish-life in the sea. 



Up to the present time the fishing gear employed by naturalists 

 has been that of the practical fishermen, and rightly too. For a 

 naturalist to devise a new and better type of fishing apparatus than 

 exists, he must serve an apprenticeship in the making and working 

 of the old, so that he may share with t!ie practical men the experience 

 of many generations. The danger then arises, however, of his becoming 

 too much enamoured of the one or two special types he himself has 

 had experience of and losing sight of the others. It would be im- 

 possible to find a more careful or better description of a trawl and 

 the working of that trawl than the one given by Dr. Petersen for 

 what he calls the " otter drag-seine " ; yet an essential portion of 



