A team of two Australian inventors were today awarded the grand prize in the International Smart Gear Competition for a fishing gear innovation that could save thousands of seabirds from dying accidentally on longlines each year. The winners were officially announced in Vigo, Spain at the World Fishing Exhibition.
The Grand Prize winning team consists of Phil Ashworth, general manager of Australia-based Amerro Engineering and Graham Robertson, a principal research scientist with the Australian Antarctic Division. Their invention – the underwater baited hook – allows longline vessels to set baited hooks underwater out of reach of seabirds. Designed for use on coastal tuna and swordfish vessels worldwide, the invention minimises or eliminates mortality of seabirds including albatrosses, petrels and shearwaters, which seize bait on the water surface or deep dive and are accidentally killed. This unique underwater bait setting technology solves a huge conservation problem with the use of longlines particularly in large industrial fleets. This year’s International Smart Gear Competition Grand Prize winners beat more than 71 other contenders from 27 countries.
Two other inventions to help reduce bycatch have won runner up prizes of $10,000 for their inventors. A team from Belgian’s Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research (ILVO) won for their invention named Hovercran, which substantially reduces bycatch in shrimp trawls. The other runner-up prize winner is David Sterling, of Australia’s Sterling Trawl Gear Services, who developed a device called the Batwing Board, an alternative to the standard trawl door used by most trawl operators, which both reduces impact to the sea bottom by approximately 90% and reduces fuel consumption.
This year’s competition also features a special East African Marine prize of $7,500 which has been awarded to Samwel B. Bikkens of Kenya’s Moi University for his device known as The Selector. The invention makes use of fish responses to light and water movement to address a bycatch problem in Lake Victoria, the largest lake in East Africa and an important fishery in the region.
“WWF created the International Smart Gear Competition to reward and inspire innovative ideas to reduce fisheries bycatch,” says Bill Fox, WWF’s vice president of fisheries. “Bycatch is both an environmental and economic problem, and one of the greatest and most pervasive threats to seabirds, sharks, sea turtles, fish and marine mammals that live in the oceans. Smart Gear represents a unique collaboration among conservationists, fishermen, and scientists to develop innovative devices that enable fishermen to fish more sustainably.”
