3.2 PURSE SEINE NETS are a type of active fishing gear that catch fish by encircling them with a net. Most of the time the net will be set and get towed by a support vessel that circles the fish shoal and it gets closed from beneath trapping the fish while getting pulled back into the ship. As they get operated mostly at the sea surface level there is little to no interaction between purse seine nets and the seabed. Sometimes during fishing operations a section of the purse seine might suffer damage and need to be cut apart but this doesn't necessarily mean it ends up in the ocean. But repair segments can unintentionally be lost when the next haul is brought up if the pieces are sitting on the working deck. Dedicated containers for repair sections are an easy mitigation measure against loss of repair segments, which is important because these segments can be 32 several meters in size and cause similar harm on the sea surface as FADs and floating trawl segments. For example, when washed up in the beach, repair cut-outs were observed to trap Svalbard reindeer on North European beaches, which starved with their antlers trapped in netting97. Entire nets can be lost, however, if the school of fish is too large and heavy and/or the line holding the net aloft breaks, though this is an extremely rare occurrence. Purse seiners will make intensive attempts to recover a lost net because of its large economic value and high cost of a new purchase. If lost, this type of weighted fishing net will most likely sink towards the bottom of the sea and unless it has a somewhat large mesh size it is likely other animals might get entangled. At the seabed it might affect other forms of biodiversity, or even be moved around by bottom currents once the contained catch is degraded. See figures 12 and 13.