Word: trawl
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...swift and agile fish get caught in slow-moving nets? They simply get tired. This seaborne secret was documented recently when skindivers of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries hung on the mouth of a big submerged trawl and took movies of fish as they were caught. The net moved through the water as slowly as 2 m.p.h., a pace that most fish can exceed with ease. But the skindivers learned that, fast as fish are, most of them are too lazy to take evasive measures. They swim languidly for a while to keep ahead of the net, but eventually...
Encouraged by these observations, the bureau's Seattle base designed a monster, bag-shaped trawl. The mouth, 117 ft. square, is kept open by floats and kitelike "otter boards"; it can be submerged at any depth. The great net is pulled through the water at less than 3 m.p.h. A few fish, including salmon, are smart enough to recognize danger and dart to safety, but most types do not take alarm until too late...
...Southern California, Dr. Carl L. Hubbs of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was having good fishing with a new kind of deep-sea trawl. Its mouth is held open by a broad, V-shaped steel beam that acts like an airplane wing in reverse, making the net dive downward while giving it unusual stability. It can be towed at six knots, instead of the two knots which is top speed for ordinary trawls...
...heavy, infrequent meals. It can swallow a victim three times as big as itself. Another fish has a well-defined neck. Another has a huge lower jaw, a hundred times the size of the rest of its head, which it uses very much as Dr. Hubbs uses his trawl...
...king crab, which often measures up to five feet between claw tips and weighs about 15 pounds, is tenderer than lobster, less oily than crab. The crabs are caught chiefly in trawl nets dragged over flat bottom areas of the North Pacific...