Wasteland Survivalist: A Scientific Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Survival

Over the next few days, Gu Lang shifted his focus to the seaside.

He sat on the smooth rocks washed by the waves, with a fishing rod stuck beside him.

His gaze was fixed on the ebb and flow of the sea, while his ears caught the sounds coming from his individual communicator.

The troops appear to have completed their military operations on Yushan Island, with occasional mentions in communications of "transitioning to disinfection operations."

The maritime blockade remained tight, and the atmosphere was even more tense.

Just yesterday, he clearly heard a communication.

"An unidentified civilian helicopter entered the outer perimeter of Qushan Island from the northeast and was shot down according to the pre-arranged plan."

He silently gazed at the distant horizon, pondering his future path.

Xizhai Island is safe for the time being, but it is ultimately an uninhabited island.

Prolonged siege and the consumption of resources is unsustainable.

More than an hour later, Gu Lang blinked his dry eyes and prepared to end his sea fishing trip for the day.

However, when he lifted the fishing rod, the light feeling in his hand startled him.

The bait vanished without a trace, and a section of the hook disappeared inexplicably as well.

"Oh no!" He suddenly realized something.

With a roar, it lunged towards the other side of the reef, where a rope was tied and soaked in seawater.

They quickly pulled the rope and dragged the fish trap, which had been soaking in the sea for a day and a night, up to the surface.

The sight of the water-filled cage made his heart sink.

A hole the size of a bowl was broken in the side of the cage, but there was no fish inside.

The snail meat I put in as bait yesterday has also disappeared completely.

He examined the breach carefully and found that it was clearly not caused by the rocks; there were obvious jagged marks at the break.

"Damn it, I knew it was that son of a bitch pufferfish!" Gu Lang couldn't help but curse.

Pufferfish prefer to eat prey with hard shells, and their powerful jaws and specialized plate-like teeth can easily crush snail shells.

Its teeth are similar in structure to bird beaks, but are harder, and the muscles in its mouth are extremely well-developed, resulting in an amazing bite force.

Records show that a one-pound pufferfish can bite through a 5-millimeter diameter wire.

Ordinary nylon braided fishing nets are no match for these creatures, making them one of the "habitual offenders" of damaging fishing gear in coastal areas.

One could be a group of gluttonous pufferfish passing by.

They ate all the bait he had set up and gnawed a way out of the trap.

Before leaving, he also took his fishing hook with him.

Looking at the tattered cage in his hand, Gu Lang threw it directly on the ground.

It's no longer of any use. Even if he repairs it today, the pufferfish will come back tomorrow.

This was intolerable, so Gu Lang decided to build more robust fishing gear and headed straight to the nearby "building materials market".

They began searching diligently in the area of ​​garbage that had been washed ashore by the waves.

They quickly found some large plastic buckets, including 19-liter water containers and 10-liter cooking oil containers.

These PET plastic buckets are tough and have uniform wall thickness.

"You're the ones." Gu Lang began to work on making an improved version of the fishing trap.

He used a knife to mark the curved rim of the upper part of each plastic bucket.

Then the bottle neck was cut off along with the entire bottle, with the cut line at approximately one-third of the height of the bottle body.

Then, invert the cut-off "funnel"-shaped part and insert it back into the upper opening of the barrel with the bottle mouth facing inward.

This creates an inverted structure inside the barrel with a large inlet and a small outlet.

Next, use a knife to drill several small holes at the joint between the "funnel" and the barrel, so that you can tie and secure it with fishing net line.

To ensure the water flows smoothly inside and outside the trap, so that the fish that enter have enough oxygen to survive, and also to facilitate the diffusion of scent.

Gu Lang also used a knife to evenly drill dozens of round holes, each about 1 centimeter in diameter, in the lower part of the body of each plastic bucket.

These holes allow for water exchange while being large enough to prevent fish from escaping.

He also made improvements to the way the bait was placed.

I found some small plastic bottles, drilled many small holes in the bottles, stuffed the crushed conch meat into the bottles, and then closed the lids.

Then, use a short stick to pierce through the bottle, suspending the small bait bottle in the center of the trap.

In this way, the bait won't scatter everywhere, and the scent can diffuse out through the small hole.

Fish are attracted by the scent of the bait and swim into the trap through the large opening of the funnel.

The instinct to escape will drive it forward, making it difficult to find and pass through the narrow opening behind it.

Especially when multiple fish enter, it is easier to create chaos, further reducing the probability of escape.

Traditional fish traps are made of individual nylon threads woven into a mesh structure.

Pufferfish have sharp teeth that can easily find and bite through one or more net cables, thus tearing open a hole.

A plastic bucket, on the other hand, is a single, continuous, smooth curved surface without any "loose threads" or obvious weak connection points.

Although pufferfish teeth are sharp, they are difficult to cut effectively through plastic walls that have a certain thickness and toughness.

They may leave scratches on the surface, but the curvature of the barrel wall makes it difficult to apply force.

It's almost impossible to bite a hole in it.

Gu Lang made six of these plastic bucket fishing traps in one go.

To increase the success rate, he tied them to rocks facing different directions and at different depths.

On the way back to camp, while passing the beach.

He noticed that there were many small footprints left by sand crabs and small holes they had dug on the beach.

"The variety of seafood could be increased, which would also be good for supplementing calcium."

He then used three smaller 5-liter cooking oil containers to make a simple crab trap.

Cut off the tops of these small buckets to get three open cylinders.

Choose an area on the beach where the tide will rise high enough, but not enough to completely submerge it.

Dig three shallow holes and bury the lower half of the plastic bucket in them, leaving the top of the bucket above the ground.

Then, pile up sand on the sand around the bucket to create a gentle slope that extends all the way to the edge of the bucket.

Similarly, place the snail meat bait into a plastic bottle with small holes drilled in it, and fix it to the top of the bucket with a wooden stick.

Sand crabs are nocturnal and are attracted by the scent of bait, crawling along sand dunes in search of food.

When they climb to the edge of the bucket, they can easily slip and fall into the plastic bucket.

The barrel walls are vertical and smooth, making it impossible for sand crabs to escape due to their climbing ability.

After finishing all that, it was already late, so Gu Lang returned to the camp to rest.

The results were quickly apparent, and in the following days, Gulang's efficiency in obtaining seafood greatly improved.

The plastic bucket traps yield results almost daily, mainly small, greedy, and clumsy groupers, with the occasional black sea bream caught.

They were trapped in the bucket, yet they were still lively and energetic.

When crab traps are checked in the early morning, one or two sand crabs are often caught, and sometimes dead rats are also found.