The Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that the vessel's owner, Yu Xuejun, had called the Chinese Embassy in Pyongyang on May 10 to seek help after North Korea captured the fishing boat, which operates from Dalian, a northeastern Chinese port city.
They capture the fish by diving underneath the schools and then catching fish as they swim up, or by picking them off from the edges of the schools.
After studying a network of the structures that covers about 500 square kilometers, Erickson identified them as weirs, or fish traps, for capturing the fish that spill out onto the savanna during the rainy season.
The smuggling of the giant sea snail - known as abalone - is being linked to the Chinese Triads and international drug gangs - who capture the fish from the deep and then smuggle it into China and Hong Kong where it is eaten as a delicacy.
The equipment used to capture the fish may be purse seines, other seines, trawls, dredges, gillnets, and long-lines.
The VIE injection time includes capturing the fish, tagging the fish and releasing it back into the tank.
"But we have not captured the big fish.
As the world's eyes turned to Paris and the attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last week, Boko Haram militants captured the small fishing town of Baga, in Borno state, north-eastern Nigeria, killing as many as 2,000 people.
We would rather capture the big fish and release the small fish, such as yourself".
