Nets: fishing gear of a wide variety of designs and meshed materials, developed to collect fish and other food animals. There are two main divisions made in commercial fishing gears: passive nets and active nets.

Active nets: are trawl nets or purse seine nets, actively towed trough the water. Purse seine is a large seine designed to be set by two boats around a school of fish and so arranged that after the ends have been brought together the bottom can be closed. Trawl nets consisting of a conical bag of heavy netting and a construction to keep the net entrance open. The catch is collected in the cod end of the trawl. There are different types of trawl-nets like a pelagic, otter and beam trawl.

Passive nets: are floating in the water as a vertical screen (drift nets) or attached to poles standing in shallow water (gill nets), or fixed in shallow water (fykes and fish-traps). The main idea is that fishes swim trough the meshes with their head and cannot move back or cannot swim back out of the fykes or traps. These nets are not moved actively.

Alternative forms for nets : active nets, passive nets.