We started on a late-June day at the town dock in Tenants Harbor, adjacent to Cod End, a seafood restaurant whose backyard is littered with stacks of lobster traps and bushes of wild roses.
The P55 midwater trawl with a 10 mm liner in the cod end was used to sample mesopelagic organisms.
The cod end, a hollow truncated cone, is also made of UHMW plastic and includes a collection volume designed to provide an area where zooplankton can collect, out of the high flow region.
To investigate this, we estimated what kind of changes fishing with a 105 mm diamond mesh gillnet and a 140 mm cod end trawl would induce in the length at maturity in Baltic eastern cod stock (subdivision 25 32).
FEMNET, a numerical tool based on the finite element method, was used to estimate the shapes of four different designs of trawl cod-ends during fishing operations.
These results indicate that the combination of recent Scottish legislation to ban strengthening bags and technical conservation measures of the EU Commission to increase the minimum mesh size from 110 to 120 mm may have increased the 50% retention length of the cod-ends used by the Scottish whitefish fleet by up to 4.8 cm.
This enabled us to demonstrate how one or two round straps along the cod-end axis may change the selectivity of the cod-end compared with a reference cod-end, without round straps.
This paper reports on covered cod-end experiments to measure the selective performance of a 110 mm cod-end and a 120 mm cod-end, both with and without strengthening bags attached.
The cod-end shape estimates were then entered into the simulation tool PRESEMO, to estimate their influence on the selectivity processes in the cod-end.
Very little is known, however, concerning their effect on the selective properties of the cod-end.
The cod-end shape estimates were then entered in the selectivity simulation tool PRESEMO to simulate the selectivity processes of the various cod-end designs under the same varying fishing conditions.
