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<\/a>Reid Brown, a New Brunswick fisher, regularly fishes for lost gear. Photo by Brian Owens<\/p><\/div>\n
Dragging a 450-kilogram grapple\u2014a homemade device that resembles a trio of spiky anchors\u2014behind his boat the Rebecca & Shelley<\/em>, Brown trawls the seafloor of Passamaquoddy Bay, an offshoot of the Bay of Fundy between New Brunswick and Maine, in search of derelict lobster traps and other debris. He\u2019s logged some impressive hauls. The largest one included more than 30 lobster traps, some as much as 12 years old, as well as a tangle of rope thousands of meters long, a net half the size of a football field designed to keep birds out of aquaculture pens, a spruce log the size of a telephone pole, a gill net, and a small boat anchor. \u201cYou can really feel it when you snag a big bundle of them,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Ask any lobsterman, and you\u2019ll learn that losing traps is a costly fact of life and something they work hard to avoid. It\u2019s not unusual for a fisher with about 300 traps to lose around 10 to 15 traps a season. The traps are lost when boat propellers slice through the ropes, or when strong currents and powerful tides drag the traps around. They snag together, growing into bigger and bigger snarls like underwater snowballs. Sometimes the best places for fishing can be the worst for losing traps, such as the \u201ccod hole,\u201d a large depression in the seafloor near Deer Island that is filled with fish and lobsters, but also traps from several boats, and swirling eddies that can tangle the gear.<\/p>\n Aside from being a menace to marine animals, lost traps are an economic headache for the fishers. The traps and attached rope cost up to CAN $200, but even worse, when traps go missing, their owners miss out on the lobsters they would have brought in. Losing 10 traps could mean forgoing as much as $5,000 worth of lobsters in a season, says Brown.<\/p>\n The combined environmental and economic costs were behind the FNFA\u2019s decision to clean up ghost gear. Since 2008, they have retrieved 1,000 traps, as well as more than 23 kilometers of rope, almost 700 meters of metal cable, 76 buoys, and a collection of other debris including nets, chains, and the front axle and wheels of a truck from the 1940s. About half of the traps and a lot of the rope were still usable, and in many cases could be returned to their owners, says Brown, although \u201cit was a lot of work to untangle it.\u201d<\/p>\n Reid Brown pulls up ghost gear from the ocean off Canada\u2019s east coast. Photo courtesy of the Fundy North Fishermen\u2019s Association<\/p><\/div>\n Lacuna hauled around his necklace of rope most of the summer. For weeks local volunteers tried to free him. The only volunteer whale disentanglement team in the area, from New Brunswick\u2019s Campobello Island, tried three times in mid-July, but after their first attempt Lacuna fled whenever they came near. A scientific study team from Massachusetts working in the area glimpsed Lacuna and tried to help him, but fog and rough seas kept them from getting close enough. By September, Lacuna had not been seen for several weeks.<\/p>\n That same month Lacuna disappeared from view, the international organization World Animal Protection held its first Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI) meeting in London, England. Around 75 people dedicated to preserving marine life, from environmental groups, government agencies, the fishing industry, and seafood companies, gathered to share ideas about how to tackle the problem and save the hundreds of thousands of animals entangled and killed each year.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s lots of good local work and excellent solutions already, but what\u2019s missing is a coordinated framework to tackle it globally,\u201d says Katherine George, project manager of the GGGI.<\/p>\n Groups from around the world, including FNFA, have joined the GGGI to help develop an international plan for dealing with ghost gear. There is currently little regulation and a lack of enforcement regarding fishing gear once it\u2019s off the boat.<\/p>\n The Global Tuna Conservation program has been focusing on a source of ghost gear that is deliberately tossed overboard\u2014the fish aggregating devices (FADs) used by the tuna industry to attract and corral tuna. Since tuna and other marine animals like to hang around floating objects in the open ocean, tuna boats attach big bundles of nets and other garbage to a floating raft, equip it with a satellite tag or radio beacon, and dump it overboard. They return later to scoop up the tuna that has gathered underneath.<\/p>\n A gray seal caught in a fishing net off the coast of England. Photo by Alex Mustard\/Nature Picture Library\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n The FADs hang down hundreds of meters into the water column, where they entangle and kill animals such as sharks and turtles. The Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that since 2013 alone, the total number of drifting FADs tossed overboard is between 81,000 and 121,000<\/a>\u2014and the vast majority are never recovered, or even seen again by fishers. \u201cThere is an extraordinarily large amount of gear floating around out there, still aggregating fish, but most of them are never fished,\u201d says Amanda Nickson, director of Global Tuna Conservation at Pew. \u201cThere are pretty much no rules, they can just leave it out there as garbage. You wouldn\u2019t see that in any other Earth environment.\u201d<\/p>\n So Pew is working to tighten the rules with a group of eight Pacific island nations in whose waters the majority of skipjack tuna fishing takes place. Starting this year, these countries will require fishing boats to share satellite tracking data with their national fisheries departments, and with conservation scientists, so that the FADs can be monitored and studied after being released. It\u2019s a start, but what Nickson would really like to see is a limit on how many FADs can be released, and a requirement that fishers must pick them up again.<\/p>\n Other groups around the world are also developing strategies to clean up the oceans. To help whales like Lacuna, the World Cetacean Alliance (WCA) mobilizes whale watching tour companies through its Net Effect campaign. The program provides companies with education packages they can share with their customers and gets them involved in mapping and cleaning up the derelict gear they spot when out at sea. Lacuna is far from alone in having trouble with fishing gear. Whale entanglements are on the rise: in 2014, 30 whales were seen entangled in fishing gear, mostly crab pots, on the US Pacific coast<\/a>, nearly double the number seen the previous year. And in the first half of 2015, 25 whales were seen entangled in California alone.<\/p>\n This spring, the WCA will send the education packs to 700 tour companies in 24 countries, and hopes to reach 500,000 customers.<\/p>\n
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