Our Oceans Are Haunted

Regardless of whether you believe in ghosts, ghost nets, traps, and pots in the form of lost fishing gear are a very real problem.

I started thinking about them a while back when the Shifting Baselines blog (currently defunct) ran a piece with video of teams capturing ghost nets in Puget Sound, more recently Tim Wheeler at the (now also defunct) Bay & Environment blog had an interesting story on paying out of work Virgina waterman (due to fisheries closures based on decreasing stocks) to round up ghost crab pots in VA's parts of the Chesapeake Bay.

That effort removed 8,600 pots and 61 nets containing more than 5,000 crabs, the going estimate is apparently 50 crabs per ghost pot a year. NOAA and the MD DNR estimated a couple of years ago that 42,000 ghost pots probably haunt MD's Chesapeake waters. Frustratingly that study has apparently yet to be followed up on even though they promised next steps and information on capturing ghost pots in late 2008. (A recent Environmental News Service article puts the number of estimated Chesapeake ghost pots at 150,000, albeit with no support)

The UN Environment Program released a report this spring on the growing threat posed by ghost fishing gear. Worldwide 10% of ocean debris is thought to be deadly ghost gear (that weighs in at 640,000 tons) which adds up to a lot of dead fish and other critters, none of which we get to eat either.

Here is the first video to pop up on YouTube, from Oregon Public TV...


(if you want to see more just type in ghost nets)