Fishing net

[3][4] Some of the oldest rock carvings at Alta (4200–500 BC) have mysterious images, including intricate patterns of horizontal and vertical lines sometimes explained as fishing nets.

American Native Indians on the Columbia River wove seine nets from spruce root fibers or wild grass, again using stones as weights.

[5] With the help of large canoes, pre-European Maori deployed seine nets which could be over one thousand metres long.

The nets were woven from green flax, with stone weights and light wood or gourd floats, and could require hundreds of men to haul.

In ancient Roman literature, Ovid makes many references to fishing nets, including the use of cork floats and lead weights.

The tough, fibrous inner bark of the pawpaw was used by Native Americans and settlers in the Midwest for making ropes and fishing nets.

Fossilised fragments of "probably two-ply laid rope of about 7 mm diameter" have been found in one of the caves at Lascaux, dated about 15,000 BC.

Other rope in antiquity was made from the fibers of date palms, flax, grass, papyrus, leather, or animal hair.

[citation needed] In modern times, hemp was almost the only material in large scale use in fishing gear until 1900 when it found competition from cotton.

[16] The first nylon fishing nets emerged in Japan in 1949 (although tests of similar equipment were taking place around the world in the last years of the 1940s).

The introduction of synthetic fibres in fishing gear from around 1950 changed a way of using natural materials that goes back several thousands of years.

[35] Some types of fishing nets, like seine and trammel, need to be kept hanging vertically in the water by means of floats at the top.

Known as ghost nets, these entangle fish, whales, dolphins, sea turtles, sharks, dugongs, crocodiles, seabirds, crabs, and other creatures, restricting movement, causing starvation, laceration and infection, and, in those that need to return to the surface to breathe, suffocation.