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Dieren en planten

Water en land

Mens en Milieu

Fishery techniques   Drift net fisheries   Herring net fisheries   
Drifnets, Ecomare

Drift net fisheries

Drift nets stand up in the water like a curtain, with buoys at the top and weights hanging on the bottom. The fish are caught when their gills or other projections tangle in the net. Finely meshed drift nets (herring nets) used to be used in earlier days for the herring fisheries in the North Sea. Large-meshed drift nets are presently used a lot in the oceans for catching tuna, swordfish and the common Atlantic squid. The largest drift nets ever were more than 50 kilometers long and 15 meters high. Drift nets can be deadly for all kinds of cetaceans.

  • Campaigning to end bycatch

    Greenpeace has been campaigning for years to end drift net fisheries in the oceans due to the thousands of dolphins that die in these nets. However, it's not just dolphins. The annual bycatch from Japanese driftnet fisheries for squid consisted of 1000 salmon, 90,000 sharks, 1 million tuna, 3 million other fish, 30,000 seabirds, 2000 marine mammals and 37 sea turtles. In Europe, a small part of the French, Irish, British, Italian and Danish fleet use drift nets in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to fish for tuna and swordfish. Drift net fisheries in European waters has been banned since 1 January 2002. Fishing with large meshed drift nets has never been a tradition in the North Sea.