A New Year's Day Beach Cleanup with the Rogy 360 Panoramic Camera — In Search of a Mysterious Species: the "Zhejiang Fish"

New Year's Day 2020 arrived with the same steady drizzle as always. Temperatures along the North Coast had plunged to around 13°C, yet by 8 a.m. the beaches near Jinshan and Wanli were already packed with people — all of them on a mission to track down a mysterious species: the "Zhejiang Fish." Would this crowd succeed? The Editor joined the New Year's Day quest, Rogy 360 panoramic camera and ATMOS Mission One dive computer (in its new colorway) in tow.

Capturing Every Moment with the Rogy 360 Panoramic Camera

The group headed en masse to the Wanli shoreline to kick off the mission. In addition to standard cameras, a vendor kindly lent us a Rogy 360 panoramic camera to document the event. 360° cameras have their own unique appeal, but they typically come with a hefty price tag and remain out of reach for most people. The Rogy 360, developed by a Taiwanese manufacturer, burst onto the scene with high-end specs and versatile single-unit live-streaming capabilities, offering streamers and event organizers a whole new way to document activities. If you're curious about how it works or what it can do, check out the links below!

• Zeczec × Rogy 360 Crowdfunding Page

• Business Next: NT$150 million in debt and still choosing to start over — can this MIT panoramic camera be his comeback?

• Rogy 360 Panoramic Camera, 100% MIT! One device for photos, video, and live streaming!

Please view the 360° video below using the Chrome browser on your phone or desktop.

While a 360° camera captures the full panorama and lets viewers adjust their own viewing angle so nothing is missed, it does have its limitations in low-light conditions. The overcast weather during our beach cleanup shoot unfortunately brought down the overall image quality. Another thing to watch out for when filming in 360°: pay close attention to movement flow within the scene — it's easy to focus on what's in front of you while forgetting that the rest of the frame might show nothing but a blank wall.

Please view the 360° video below using the Chrome browser on your phone or desktop.

Wait — So What Exactly Is a "Zhejiang Fish"?

It turns out that "Zhejiang Fish" are actually the floats attached to gill nets. Compared to the expensive gear used in deep-sea fishing, these floats are inexpensive and mainly used for nearshore fishing, with the net mesh size selected to match the target catch. Perhaps because of their low cost, fishers don't treat them with much care — if a net snags on a reef, it simply gets abandoned at sea, left to drift on the currents until it washes ashore. In just an hour and a half of cleanup, we collected 1,075 "Zhejiang Fish." We heard Brother Chen from Dòngshǒu Ài Táiwān share that at one beach cleanup in 2019, over 6,000 of them were recovered — an astonishing number!

So why are they called "Zhejiang Fish"? Because most of the floats recovered have the characters "浙江" (Zhejiang) printed on them in large letters — presumably the name of the manufacturer — and the nickname stuck.

Cleanup Stats

• 144 participants

• 1,950 kg of debris collected

• 1,075 "Zhejiang Fish" recovered

To borrow a favourite saying of Brother Chen Xin-Zhu from 動手愛台灣: "A beach cleanup is not the end point of the marine debris problem — it's the starting point for rethinking our relationship with the ocean." If we keep reflecting on the balance between humanity and the sea, perhaps the next time you reach for a single-use plastic bottle out of convenience, you'll make a different choice.

Further reading:

• 動手愛台灣

• Zeczec × Rogy 360 Crowdfunding Page

• ATMOS MISSION ONE — The Most Talked-About dive computer of 2019

• NCCU Diving Club Beach Cleanup Reflection: A Little Inconvenience for Us, Infinite Opportunity for the Ocean

• What to Do on World Oceans Day? Join the Beach and Ocean Cleanup at Waimushan!