Salmon Trap

The best way to trap salmon is to make them trap themselves.
So effective is the design of the ‘putcher’ that it has barely changed in 1000 years. Fishermen on the River Severn would arrange dozens of these traps between sticks buried in the mud of the river and forming a wall. The salmon would then simply swim into the traps, and the fishermen would collect them.
Until the 1950s seasonal salmon were caught using basketwork traps like this. They are now more commonly fished year round on special farms. But farmed fish have fewer Omega-3s, which are beneficial to human health, so they are sometimes fed genetically modified cereals to add these extra fatty acids.