WWF's International Smart Gear Competition - Winners

Winners of 2007 International Smart Gear Competition announced

A team of Rhode Island scientists, fishermen, and a net maker have been awarded the $30,000 grand prize in the International Smart Gear Competition for a fishing gear innovation that could save thousands of fish and other sea creatures from dying accidentally in fishing nets each year.

The Grand Prize winning team consists of University of Rhode Island Fisheries Center researchers Laura Skrobe and David Beutel, net maker Jon Knight, and fishermen, Phil Ruhle Sr., Phil Ruhle Jr., and Jim O'Grady. Their invention - aptly named "The Eliminator" - captures haddock while reducing the accidental netting of other marine species.

The device works by taking advantage of the haddock’s tendency to swim upward but not over the headrope when encountering the large mesh net invention, instead of swimming downward where they can escape the net, which is the tendency of other fish. The Grand Prize winners beat out more than 70 other contenders from 22 countries.

Two other inventors won runner-up prizes of $10,000 each for their inventions to help reduce bycatch.

Diego Gonzalez Zevallos, a marine biologist at the Centro Nacional Patagónico in Argentina, studied the accidental death of seabirds as they dive for food and are struck by trawling cables and dragged under the water and drown. His device, a simple plastic cone is likely to dramatically reduce seabird deaths, while not affecting the profitability for fishermen.

The other runner-up prize winner, Glen Parsons, a biology professor at the University of Mississippi, created a cylinder device called the Nested Cylinder Bycatch Reduction Device. This is designed to reduce the bycatch of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico shrimp trawl fishery.