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This tiny hook was ground out of a sea-snail shell. It lay in a cave in Okinawa, Japan, for twenty-three thousand years. So people have been catching fish at least that long. How many ways of doing it are there? Count them by name, and you'll never finish. Change the place or the fish, and the same trick gets a new name.
So the UN's food and farming agency counts differently. It ignores the names and asks only how the fish gets caught. Counted that way, every method in the world fits into ten big families. Family one: hooks. The fish bites the bait and gets hooked. Some boats run one long line, carrying hundreds or thousands of hooks.
What we usually call fishing with a rod is just one of the ten. Most of the rest use nets. The oldest net we know was woven from willow bark. Over ten thousand years ago, it sank into a lake in Finland. One kind of net circles a whole school of fish, then pulls the bottom shut, like tightening a drawstring bag.
Another sweeps a big loop around the fish and hauls it ashore. Another is like a giant sack, towed behind a boat. There's also an iron-framed rake, dragged along the seabed to scoop up shellfish. Some nets wait underwater, and get lifted when fish swim above. Some fall from the sky. One throw, and the fish are covered.
Some nets are like an invisible wall in the water. The fish pushes in: head through, body stuck. Another family is traps. Easy to get in, impossible to get out. Shrimp pots, bamboo baskets, fences across a river: they all count. The last family holds everything else: spears, scoop nets, diving down to grab by hand, even pumps that suck small fish up.
Ten slots, all full. Whatever the country, whatever the name, it fits in one of these ten. Some people even get animals to help. On Japan's Nagara River, fishers have worked with cormorants for over thirteen hundred years. In a seaside town in Brazil, dolphins drive fish in and give a signal, and people throw their nets on cue. So the names are endless, but the ideas come in just ten. Next time you see a fish at the market, take a guess: did it bite a hook, hit a net, or swim into a trap?
What's the strangest way to catch fish you've ever seen? Tell me in the comments.
Count by name and you'll never finish. Sort by how the fish gets caught, and every method on Earth fits into ten families.
This is how the UN Food and Agriculture Organization sorts fishing gear for world fishing statistics. The current version dates from 2016.
Change the place or the fish, and the same trick gets a new name. That's why the list of names never ends.
The order here follows the story, not the official codes. Official names: hooks and lines, surrounding nets, seine nets, trawls, dredges, lift nets, falling gear, gillnets and entangling nets, traps, miscellaneous gear.
In Brazil, scientists used drones and underwater microphones to record it: the better people and dolphins time it, the more both of them catch. The partnership has lasted over 140 years.
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