The French brown shrimp (Crangon crangon) fishery employs on a seasonal basis around 140 ships about 10 metres in length and with engines of about 100 kilowatts of power. It takes place mainly along the coastal bottoms of silted-up sand at a depth of 2 to 10 metres and occupies principally the coasts of the eastern English Channel and those of the Gulf of Gascony. The brown shrimp catch is performed by bottom trawl, with exempted meshing of 20 mm (stretched mesh), which causes numerous rejects of immature fish that live on the same bottoms. The main part of these juveniles is made up of flat fish (sole, in particular) and of gadidae (whiting and pout). To reduce these undesirable catches that are also detrimental to other fisheries, some ingenious... |