Marc d’Entremont and Angie Greene of Katchi, photographed on the harbour in Yarmouth, N.S, are helping reinvent trawling for better sustainability and costs.Chelsey Belliveau
As a fourth-generation fisher in Yarmouth, N.S., Marc d’Entremont saw the sun setting on traditional trawling, a style of fishing his family had built their livelihood on.
The centuries-old fishing process where vessels drag large, cone-shaped nets held open by a pair of one-tonne steel doors (which often make contact with the sea floor) was becoming costly amid reduced fishing grounds, restrictive quotas, rising environmental scrutiny and soaring fuel prices.
“We needed to change to meet the new policies, but also make the operations better by reducing costs, fuel consumption, gear repairs and bycatch,” says Mr. d’Entremont. “We needed to start to figure out a different way to fish.”
So, he launched Katchi, a fishing tech startup. The company developed a precision harvesting system that ditches the trawl doors, instead using computer-controlled winches that dynamically move the net up and down the water column to catch targeted fish without touching the sea floor. Meanwhile, unmanned vessels on the surface scout for fish, delivering hydroacoustic data to the boat. It’s a more sustainable – both economically and ecologically – way to trawl.
“We’re coming off three separate sea trials,” says Angie Greene, CFO of Katchi. “We’re pumped because we’ve proven all of the concepts that this net system can work.”
Katchi, which received funding from Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, an industry-led ocean-tech innovation ecosystem, is part of a small group of innovators finding ways to reinvent fishing by introducing modernity to a traditional industry.
A more whale-friendly lobster trap
Fish and seafood are among the largest single-food commodities exported by Canada. According to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), in 2023, Canada exported over $7.6-billion worth of fish and seafood products to 115 countries.
Up the coast from Yarmouth, in Bedford, N.S., Ashored Innovations is addressing efficiency and sustainability issues in the lobster and crab fishing industries. The tech company has designed a ropeless trap to reduce marine animal ensnarement.
Co-founder Aaron Stevenson came up with the idea in 2017, a catastrophic year for whale ensnarements. “You had 17 North Atlantic right whales that died that year,” he says. Joe Howlett, a volunteer disentangler from the Campobello Whale Rescue Team in New Brunswick also died that year while trying to disentangle a whale.
Ashored Innovations’ MOBI cage contains and coils a fisher’s line on the ocean floor until they return to collect their gear.Ashored.ca
Traditionally, traps on the ocean floor are connected to a buoy on the surface by a rope that spans the water column, often left in place for days or weeks. Whales that bump into the buoy lines can become startled and roll, causing them to be entangled.
Ashored has created a two-pronged system – the Modular Ocean Based Instrument (MOBI) and the Automated Tracking and Location Aggregation System (ATLAS), to avoid this problem, explains Mr. Stevenson, who co-founded the company alongside Ross Arsenault.
MOBI contains and coils a fisher’s line on the ocean floor until they return to collect their gear. It can be triggered acoustically from the vessel, sending the entire system and the cage to the surface for re-baiting. ATLAS is a suite of software and hardware that can report all sorts of useful data including the orientation of the traps and when they were last seen, reducing the problem of “ghost gear” on the ocean floor.
“It gives us the ability to start diving into more of a data-backed approach to fishing,” says Mr. Stevenson.
Real-time fishery monitoring
On Canada’s west coast, Vancouver-based tech startup OnDeck Fisheries AI is tackling a different challenge: fishery monitoring. Currently, the DFO conducts monitoring either by compliance officers on a boat or through camera footage.
“Boats will be out for weeks, sometimes months at a time, and come back with hundreds or thousands of hours of video footage stored on a hard drive sent to an office somewhere, and a human sits down at a computer to manually count all of the fish that were caught,” says Alexander Dungate, who co-founded OnDeck Fisheries AI alongside Sepand Dyanatkar.
Major lags in reviewing footage almost defeat the purpose of capturing the footage, says Dungate. “It’s kind of too late to make any impactful management decisions or enforcement decisions.” A 2023 audit by Canada’s environment and sustainable development commissioner found the DFO hasn’t been collecting reliable or timely information, risking overfishing of commercial stocks.
OnDeck Fisheries’ AI-powered software can identify a catch without needing human observers.Supplied
OnDesk Fisheries’ AI-powered software is capable of counting and identifying what’s being caught at sea in real time, using computer vision technology to track the biomass and type of fish without needing human observers. The startup has run several pilots and is just starting a trial with five Indigenous nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
“[It will] empower them to have timely and accurate fisheries management information that’s never been available to them before,” he says.
Like Katchi and Ashored, OnDeck Fisheries AI is approaching innovation by building on what is already there. That’s a necessity in the fishing tech space – as Katchi’s Angie Greene points out, Canada may be a leader in fishing innovation, but it’s still a lonely field.
“There are not a lot of companies looking to innovate fishing,” says Ms. Greene, who grew up in a fishing family. “I don’t know why that is; it might be that the people in our industry are just hardworking and they put their heads down and they fish.”
That may well be the case, but Mr. d’Entremont is convinced that change needs to come from the industry itself.
“You need to empower the people that are in the industry to innovate,” he says. “They know the problems because they live it every day.”