Design and General Characteristics of Trammel Net for Cuttle Fish and Squid operated along the Southeast Coast of Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Trammel net is one of the important fishing gears operated along Thoothukudi coast of Tamil Nadu. This paper documents the design and general features of Cuttle Fish Trammel Net (CFTN) being operated by the fishermen of Therespuram fishing village to capture Cuttle fishes and Squids. It was observed that both the inner and outer panels of CFTN were made of Nylon mono filament webbing. The mesh size of the inner panel ranged from 52 mm to 60 mm, whereas the mesh sizes of outer panels ranged from 265 to 290 mm. The number of meshes in the inner and outer panels of CFTN along length was 1,500 and 350 respectively whereas along the depth the number of meshes was 50 and 7-8 respectively. The hanging coefficient of inner and outer panel was estimated to be 0.4 and 0.7, respectively. A pair of polypropylene ropes (PP) with thickness of 3-5 and 3 mm were tied together and used as head rope and foot rope in CFTN. A total 6 to 10 units of trammel nets were found to be used per fishing trip. The trammel nets were set before sunrise and hauled after the soaking duration of 3 hrs. Indiscriminate fishing with respect to different sizes of both cuttle fishes and squids was the major problem encountered in this net due to its entangling nature. Among the various species captured by the trammel net finfishes are found to be the dominant species (70.9 Kg/soaking day) followed by cuttle fishes (8.1 Kg/soaking day). Crabs were the least dominant species with catch rate of 1.4 Kg/soaking day.