Comparative fishing to evaluate the viability of an aligned footgear designed to reduce seabed contact in Northern shrimp bottom trawl fisheries

We developed and evaluated an innovative trawl technology that reduces seabed contact while targeting Northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis) off the east coast of Canada. The innovative footgear, referred to as the â aligned footgearâ , was evaluated in a flume tank to estimate contact area with the seabed and then tested at-sea for engineering performance and catchability. Results demonstrated that the aligned footgear trawl produced a substantial reduction (i.e., 61%) in the predicted contact area with the seabed compared to the identical trawl equipped with traditional rockhopper footgear. A total of 20 paired tows (n=40 tows) were subsequently conducted at-sea to evaluate fishing performance. The aligned footgear trawl caught significantly more Northern shrimp (+23%), capelin (+71%), Greenland halibut (+99%) compared to the traditional rockhopper bottom trawl. This study was part of Project 2.2 in the Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN).The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author