The Norwegian shrimp trawling industry faces major challenges related to efficiency, profitability, and sustainability. In the Norwegian trench/Skagerrak, stock recruitment is poor, while recruitment is healthy north of 62°N, and there is a sustainable stock with potential for increased harvest and profitability.
SINTEF has long collected data from shrimp trawling and calculated diesel usage per kilogram of whole shrimp caught. We observe that the start of a trawl is particularly costly due to long search times, which can exceed a day from the start of towing until hitting a shrimp aggregation. Through this project, we aim to reduce the time it takes to locate a school once shrimp enter the trawl.
A key challenge in today’s trawl fishing is that catches are usually only observed onboard after hauling, leaving fishers without factual information about what enters the trawl during fishing. With real-time monitoring of what actually goes into the trawl, fishing can be targeted and bycatch avoided.
Although commercial trawl camera systems exist, they pose problems for fishers because they require an extra cable for video transmission (Krag et al., 2023) and added complexity if a tarpaulin must be integrated at the bottom of the trawl to reduce sediment disturbance. It is therefore important to develop a commercial system that transmits catch information wirelessly to the bridge system without being too complicated in practical use.
In this project, SINTEF is developing a decision support system through shrimp and bycatch detection algorithms that will run on the wireless CamSounder sensor by Scantrol Deep Vision, and software for transmitting detections from the trawl to the vessel via acoustic link.
Header image: Photo: Jarl Gunnar Taxerås/SINTEF.