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To understand the mechanism of the behavioral response in the capture process of how fish recognize fishing gear and then how they can avoid the gear, the visual acuity of Pacific saury Cololabis saira was investigated by histological examination of the retina of individuals in the size range of 75–365 mm fork length (FL). The contour map of cone density distribution shows that the highest cone density is located in the temporal area of the retina, which indicated the visual axis as the forward direction. The visual acuity (VA) depends both on the focal length of the lens and the number of cones in the retina. The lens diameter increased linearly from 1.40 to 4.73 mm with fish growth, while the cone density decreased gradually from 765 to 378 cells/0.01 mm2. Our results show that the visual acuity increases proportionately from 0.057 to 0.140 for individuals ranging in FL from 75 to 365 mm as expressed by the equation VA=0.0065×FL 0.5271 (r 2=0.9624).

Tensile and knot fatigue property of high-performance polyethylene (HPPE), regular polyethylene (PE), nylon multifilament (PAmu), and nylon monofilament (PAmo) under cyclic loading conditions were investigated. The durability of HPPE under tensile fatigue testing was largest, followed by PAmo, PAmu and PE. In knot fatigue, the largest was PAmo, followed by HPPE, PAmu, and PE. High resistance by HPPE to the cyclic loads was also confirmed by scanning electron microscopy, which showed that HPPE suffered the least damage from abrasion compared with the other twines. From the measurement of elongation changes during the cyclic loading, HPPE had very small changes. The low elongation value of HPPE was probably the result of its better fatigue property because there was less damage from abrasion.