Should We Kill Fish With Robots?

This will no doubt come as a surprise to you, but industrial fishing in the U.S. is not a pleasant experience for the fish. Quite often, fish are hauled aboard and then either dumped on the deck of a boat or unloaded onto some ice where they’re left to writhe around until they suffocate and die. This process sometimes takes hours. Along the way, the stressed fish flood their flesh with cortisol, adrenaline and lactic acid.

Some fishing operations have gone about things in a different way, adopting a Japanese fish-killing method known as Ikejime. The fish reaches the boat and then is spiked in the brain as its gills are slit. The fish dies instantly and bleeds out. It’s meant to be more humane and to result in better meat. The flesh stays firmer, lasts longer and is cleaner.

The Ikejime method requires some skill and practice and has not been widely adopted in the U.S. or Europe where folks are used to killing fish the way they’re used to killing fish. Which brings us to Shinkei Systems. It’s a startup based in El Segundo that has built a robot to automate the Ikejime technique.