Tuna Cowboys

For a long time, I have been visualising how man will one day use a new method of fishing other then the usual traditional nets that we used.

I was watching Net-Geo Channel and I came across "Tuna Cowboys" - for a while I thought maybe some cowboys decided to go fishing... but after watching the show for awhile, I realise why they call it Tuna cowboys.

Simple, the method of catching tuna fish is exactly the same herding cows in a farm accept that its in the sea.

Firstly, they use the same fishing method - purseine net to round up the school of tuna fishes and then instead of lifting them up onto a boat, they just simply herd the fishes into a round netting as you can see in the above picture. 1000-3000 fishes per catch and in that catchment net they can put about 15,000 fishes inside them - ALIVE !!!" Once they are satisfied with their catch, they will just drag the whole net catchment to the harbour with all the fishes alive. By the way, I am not talking about small fishes.. but big tuna fishes of 5-30kgs per fish. The whole routine to round up the fishes and drag it to harbour takes about 2 months.. and the hard and agonising part is the dragging of the fish catchment to harbour at a very slow speed and takes about 1 month to reach harbour.

Now what do they do with the fishes after that?
They will be place into fish farms at the harbour and further let them grow even bigger sizes before they are sold. Hundreds of millions worth....

Hard labour and innovative method...at minimal costs.
What a great way to fish...


And it's not without danger, when you have a school of trapped fishes, predator sharks will break into the nets to prey their food and that's when the tuna cowboys goes to work of getting the sharks out of the net and mending up the nets.