Cast away

It looks a bit like this boat is just doodling lines on the sea surface, but there's a little more depth to it than that. That squiggly scribble is actually the outline of a large cast net, an ancient tool used to snare whole schools of fish in shallow water. Below the surface, weights pull the walls of the net toward the sea bottom, trapping fish in a circular 'cage' before the net is closed and pulled up, ideally packed tight with the tasty swimmers. This boat is fishing for anchovies off the coast of Vietnam, but the method is used worldwide to target many types of bite-sized seafood.