Dan Watson has just won this year’s James Dyson award, a student competition with the simple brief “Design something that solves a problem”. The problem Dan chose was bycatch – the capture of types of sealife that fishermen don’t want and throw back either because there’s no market for them or they have no quota for them. He invented illuminated escape hatches that fit onto existing trawl nets that exploit the different behaviours of trapped fish to let out the ones that aren’t wanted. I’m not sure if this has been tried out yet but the award will give him funds to develop the concept.
Here’s a video explaining how it works (anyone recognise the sound track?).
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/21894812#[/vimeo]
Check out Dan’s ideas at Safety Net. HT to the Guardian
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