Sonar System May Boost Net Results

As a boy growing up in Alaska, Pat Simpson assumed he would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a commercial fisherman. He spent a few summers working on his dad’s boat, and that’s where he learned something about himself.

“I get very seasick,” he said.

So he turned instead to computer science. And after graduating from UC San Diego in 1986, he returned to his native Anchorage to look for a job.

But Alaska’s economy flows from the oil-rich slopes of the Arctic, and the price of crude had dropped below $10 a barrel, creating a statewide recession. The one thing Anchorage didn’t need was a computer scientist, and Simpson was forced to leave the land he loved.

He’s back now, after “bouncing around the defense industry” in Southern California for a decade, and, in a sense, he has rejoined the family business. Simpson has brought high tech to the fishing industry, and it could revolutionize everything from fishing techniques to resource management.

“We’re trying to take technology and apply it to the fisheries,” said Simpson, founder and president of Scientific Fishery Systems Inc. (https://www.scifish.com). “When you are born and raised in the fisheries, you grow to understand that it’s an abundant resource, but we really need to be good custodians of that resource. I’m hoping this will allow us to do that.”

Simpson has patented a broad-band sonar system that could allow resource managers to get a better handle on the abundance of a particular fish stock so that they can regulate the catch rate more efficiently. Determining abundance is one of the trickiest tasks confronting resource managers.

In Alaska, the size of the stock is estimated by monitoring catch rates in the early part of the season, but that is an inexact science, and disputes about abundance are at the heart of the current “fish wars” between Canada and the Pacific Northwest.

Simpson’s technology could give resource managers a more reliable system.

“This is really neat stuff,” said Guy Fleischer, a fisheries research scientist in the biological resources division of the U.S. Geological Survey in Ann Arbor, Mich. “I think this is so important that I’m focusing all my efforts on it.”

Fleischer has been testing Simpson’s system in Lake Michigan for the last few summers. “I think that 10 years from now we’re going to be using this very commonly in fish assessment,” Fleischer said.

After he gave up on finding a job in Alaska in 1986, Simpson returned to a research position he had held with the Navy in San Diego and then went on to several defense firms in the area. He developed enough expertise in acoustics, artificial intelligence and neural networks (the effort to create interrelated systems that function similarly to the body’s nervous system) that he wrote a book, “Artificial Neural Systems,” that sold out almost immediately.

Part of Simpson’s work had been with broadband sonar, which uses far more frequencies to capture images of underwater targets than the narrowband fish finders aboard most boats.

Meanwhile, “the Russians became our friends,” and the federal government grew anxious to convert some defense technology for civilian use. And Alaska loomed high on Simpson’s horizon once again.

If he could find a submarine, couldn’t he also find a school of fish? He applied to the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program for a grant and got enough seed money to start his own company. The NSF’s program is designed to “foster technologies that nobody else might risk funding but could lead to significant public benefits,” said Sara Nerlove, who manages the program.

Simpson used the grant to design the prototype. Then the Alaska Science and Technology Foundation, a state program, provided funds to build it.

Simpson moved his operation to Anchorage, and he now has nine employees.

Fleischer, who has been testing the system in the Great Lakes, said it holds great promise for determining not only how many fish are in the water but which kind of fish are present and how many of each.

The technology could also lower the unintended catch of such animals as porpoises and seals because it could more precisely tell fishermen what they are likely to get if they drop their nets in a certain area. And it could tell the captain of a tuna boat whether a school of fish is anywhere within 15 miles of the boat. Current fish finders reveal only what is below the vessel.

But Simpson knows that a more efficient fishing fleet could severely deplete the resource. If resource managers can measure the abundance of the stock more effectively, though, they can protect the resource by shutting down the season before the stock is too depleted.

And Simpson doesn’t have to look far for a testimonial. His father tried out his system last season while crabbing off the Alaska coast.

“He had his best season ever,” Simpson said. “Half a million pounds.”

Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].