Every year millions of tons of fish die and are discarded by commercial fishing operations as unwanted catch, called bycatch, and hundreds of thousands of marine animals, including turtles, sharks and dolphins are also killed through destructive fishing practices.

To help combat the high death rate from bycatch, the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) created a competition named Smart Gear, with thousands of dollars in prize money awarded to ideas and inventions that can reduce or prevent bycatch.

This month the $30,000 grand prize for the 2007 competition was given to a team from Rhode Island, who beat 70 other inventions from 22 countries with a device named the Eliminator, for use during haddock fishing. The device works by taking advantage of the haddock's tendency to swim upward when encountering the net, instead of swimming downward where they can escape, which other species of fish tend to do.

Last year’s prize was awarded to an electric engineer, who proposed a solution to reduce the bycatch of sharks on longlines - which has driven some shark species to the brink of extinction. His solution proposed placing magnets above fishing hooks – as studies have shown that sharks can detect magnetic fields and are repelled by strong fields.

Longline fishing, however, remains a huge threat to sharks and other many marine species. An estimated 89 percent of hammerhead sharks and 80 percent of thresher and white sharks have disappeared from the Northeast Atlantic Ocean in the last 18 years, largely due to bycatch; and as many as 250,000 endangered loggerhead turtles and critically endangered leatherback turtles are caught annually on longlines set for tuna, swordfish, and other fish.

The WWF also estimate that 26 species of seabirds, including 17 albatross species, are threatened with extinction because of longlining, which kills more than 300,000 seabirds each year – but with continued innovation and understanding of marine life, many species can still be saved from extinction.