Dec. 26, 2006 — Hundreds of underwater death traps have been discovered and carefully removed by divers in the waters off California’s Channel Islands. The work is the result of a one-year pilot program to clean up decades of lost fishing nets, lobster traps and other gear that endanger humans and wildlife.
Already divers have recovered almost ten tons of gear, including a two-ton fishing net that was spread over 5,000 square feet the seafloor.
The clean-up is the latest in a wave of new seafloor clean-ups in Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Maryland, Florida and elsewhere.
"Probably half of the gear is lost commercial lobster gear," said wildlife veterinarian Kirsten Gilardi of the University of California at Davis, regarding the Channel Islands pilot program. Gilardi has modeled the program after a four-year-old program underway in Puget Sound.
Derelict fishing nets are the most dangerous gear, said Gilardi, because they continue to trap animals — from fish to marine mammals to birds and even the occasional human — for years. Large nets can also pile up on prominent rocks and act like deadly tarps over habitats for sea urchins and rockfish.
"There are stories of divers getting caught up in fishing gear," said Gilardi, who manages the project through the SeaDoc Society, a marine ecosystem health program of the university’s Wildlife Health Center.
There’s even more compelling evidence of the killing power of derelict nets from Puget Sound, said marine biologist Jeff June of Natural Resource Consultants in Washington State. One gill net found in their program was found strung up between two rocks 100 feet apart, allowing the net to hang open about 20 feet.
"There were three (drowned) birds hanging in the net," June said. The diver also noticed what looked like a strange accumulation of gravel on the seafloor below the net. That gravel turned out to be the bones of tens of thousands of diving seabirds that had died in the same net over the years.
The Washington program has cleared about 100 acres worth of nets from the Puget Sound seafloor as well as 1,100 lost crab pots, said June. Another, older program on reefs northwest of Hawaii have recovered far more gear that had posed a hazard to protected monk seals there, he said.
A similar clean-up program is also underway in Chesapeake Bay, where the Virginia Institute of Marine Science estimates there are tens of thousands of lost crab pots used to trap blue crabs. Many of these pots have the potential to keep trapping crabs, thereby damaging the local crab population and commercial stocks.
