They are the land mines of the sea, killing long after being forgotten.
Abandoned or lost fishing gear, including traps, crab pots, and nets, litter the ocean floor around the world. Many continue to trap and kill fish, crabs, and other marine life in what's called "ghost fishing."
Pascal van Erp is a Dutch diver. He was horrified by the amount of abandoned fishing equipment he encountered. So he founded the Ghost Fishing Foundation to tackle the issue. Now groups, governments, and companies around the world work to retrieve and recycle as much of the discarded gear as they can.
Every fisherman has lost a line, lure, or net. But today, with the expansion of global fishing fleets over decades, “the problem with lost gear is enormous,” says van Erp. “It is found in all seas, oceans, and inland waters at all depths, along the beach and under sand.”
International agreements already prohibit the deliberate dumping of fishing gear at sea. But traps and lines are lost accidentally due to bad weather, water currents that drag them away, and boats that sever tie lines. Industry experts estimate that commercial fishermen lose about 10 percent of their traps each year. That’s a lot of equipment to track down and reclaim. Solving the problem will take innovative thinking.
One recommendation is to include degradable panels on future fishing traps. These would quickly break down, allowing trapped marine life to escape. Fast-degrading screws on whelk pots would serve the same purpose.
Some figures on the gear that got away: The United Nations report estimated there are 640,000 tons of abandoned fishing nets on the ocean floor worldwide. Fishing boats in Greenland lose an average of 15 nets per day, stretching nearly 2,500 feet. Ghost fishing kills four to 10 million blue crabs each year in Louisiana alone. And in Queensland, Australia, about 6,000 crab pots are lost each year.
While the scope of the problem is vast, so is the range of projects to address it. One such effort is called "Fishing for Energy." Volunteers take boats out into the bays of 48 ports in 10 states. They use sonar to detect crab pots on the seafloor. Then these “fishermen” try to snag the abandoned pots with heavy ropes and hooks. Traps that are still usable are returned to local fishermen. Unusable ones are recycled. Components that are not recyclable serve another use. They are burned in one of 40 trash-to-energy incinerators run by energy company Covanta.
