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In Europe, fishing is generally quite targeted. Fishermen know what they want to catch and

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use the appropriate methods and techniques. Despite this, when they bring in their nets,

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they often find other fish and marine organisms mixed up with the target species. This is

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what's called the bycatch. Everything in the net has to be sorted and only the fish that

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can be sold are kept. The rest are returned to the sea, where they stand little chance

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of surviving after the shock of being hauled to the surface. These are what are called

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discards. Depending on the area the fishermen are operating in and the kind of gear they're

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using, discards can make up 10 to 60 percent of the catch and sometimes more. This represents

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an unacceptable waste of resources at a time when many fish stocks have been depleted by

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intensive exploitation. The problem of discards has attracted the attention of many European

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scientists, including those who work at this institute in the UK. There are two main reasons

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why fishermen throw fish away. The prime reason is that there's no market value, nobody wants

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to eat them, nobody wants to buy them, at least locally. The other reason are legislative

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reasons and that may be things like the fisherman doesn't have a quota for that particular species

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or he's run out of quota. The catch may also include young fish which can't be sold. Bycatches

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and the resulting discards also influence the marine environment. They can alter the

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food chain of certain species and thus have an impact on the ecosystem. They can also

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represent a threat to a number of mammals and marine organisms which are already endangered.

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Discards are also a cause for concern to the European Union. That's why the Commission

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has just published a strategy to phase out this practice, outlining a number of ways

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in which discards might be reduced and, over time, eliminated altogether. In my view, discards

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are wrong because they amount to a waste of a very precious resource. We need to examine

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the way we have been doing things so far in order to work out a system whereby we do not

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continue dumping fish back into the sea and I am convinced that a discards ban will be

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beneficial to fish stocks, to the marine environment and to the fishing industry itself. Because

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it is possible to reduce discards by using more selective fishing gear, for example.

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Normally toad gear's trawls are made from diamond-shaped mesh such as this. When they're

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under tension, when they're being towed through the water and when fish start to accumulate

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in the rear part, the mesh starts to close like we see here and small fish inside the

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trawl are captured. Unwanted small fish find it very difficult to escape in these circumstances.

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By simply altering the geometric shape and the geometry, the different rigging of the

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trawl, using the same mesh, exactly the same mesh, we can make these much bigger openings

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which allow juvenile fish to escape. Simply changing to a square mesh pattern can already

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make things better and there are other devices. Selective grids, for example, which can provide

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a solution to more complex problems.

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Time for a practical demonstration. Here in Brittany, fishing for longustine, better known

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as scampi, is a major activity. However, this fishery suffers from a high discarding rate,

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often as much as 50% of the catch. The problem that the fishermen and the scientists from

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Ypres Mer had to overcome was how to avoid catching undersized longustine as well as

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small fish, such as young hake. Previously, the only solution found was to enlarge the

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mesh size so as to allow them to escape.

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And that's where the problem lies. If we'd gone to a 100mm mesh in the Bay of Biscay,

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we would have stopped catching longustine.

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Of course, we'd still have a problem.