It’s known as “ghost gear”: abandoned fishing gear, left in the sea where it endangers wildlife, indefinitely, until someone comes along and removes it.
Often, that someone is Edgardo Ochoa, a dive specialist and director of the dive program at Conservation International. He and a team of divers recently succeeded in a landmark removal project off the coast of Baja California Sur, Mexico.
It was a massive fishing net, partially buried under the sea floor of Espíritu Santo Archipelago National Park, a marine-protected area. The net itself, when fully stretched out, was nearly the length of a soccer pitch. It’s believed to be the largest individual piece of ghost gear ever removed from the ocean.
“We had 17 divers in the water,” said Ochoa, “and at some point you could see everyone just pulling up net.” The team had to cut the net into pieces in order to remove it.
They also used lift bags, which look like airbags hooked to parts of the net to provide buoyancy, and near the end of the removal, a crane to help get it out of the water.
Ochoa spoke with The World’s Marco Werman about the removal effort and the larger issue of ghost gear.
Marco Werman: This net is one clear example of ghost gear. Help us understand, though, the full range of what ghost gear is.
I mean, all the recreational fishers, like you and me, can go to the shore [with] just a line with a hook. [If it gets] entangled or something, we just cut it and leave it there. So this, if this [line] gets trapped around a coral, first of all, it starts interrupting the currents or sand, everything that’s moving around a corals. So, it starts creating some sedimentation. This sedimentation kills the coral first, and because there’s no coral, there are no crabs or shrimp in the coral, and then there’s no fish. So, something as little as this can create a dead zone that’s probably no more than two square feet. But what happens if you have 500 of these?
There goes the coral reef.
Yeah.
How responsible are industrial fishing operations for ghost gear?
Fishing gear is expensive. So, when the industrial fishers lost a net, they made all the efforts to recover and actually report it. The ones that are not reported are the ones coming from an illegal part like a marine-protected area, or off-season or using fishing gear that is not legal for that particular region or that particular target species.
What efforts are underway? Like, is there kind of just a major fix that people like you are trying to undertake to get this plastic, this ghost gear, out of the water?
[More] important than [removing nets] is to avoid the nets going in the water. And this has to be married in some way to the proper or responsible consumption of marine products. I mean, it’s very common for us in a major city, go to the supermarket and have, let’s say, a red snapper year round. But you go to coastal communities, that’s not true. So, we need to respect the closings, seasons, reproduction cycles, all this. If we start doing more educated consumption of products, I think it’s the first step.
Trying to make someone responsible [for] the fishing gear is something that has been on the table for several years already, but it doesn’t work. I believe that if we have the government enforce what is already in place, that would be much better. Every country, every place, they know the seasons. So, they just need to respect that.
Something Anthony Bourdain used to talk a lot about, we expect great tomatoes all year round, but they’re only produced a certain part of the year.
[Yes, and] the other part that I’ve done some research on is … fishing schools to show people how to fish to avoid damage. So, we need to promote more these kinds of programs and show people how to fish. That changed our perspective.
I have to say, my perspective was changed completely about 15 years ago on a beach at Cape Cod where I came across a giant sea turtle and it could not move its flippers because it was tangled up in a net. And we ran and got a knife and it took three people to kind of untangle it and get it back in the water. And I wish a lot of people could see that because then you’ll see what all those nets and fishing lines do.
We question how many times this actually happened. How many times there was a sea lion, a shark or some bigger animal. And it’s not only the iconic ones, like whales, dolphins, sea turtles. It’s so many other species that we interrupt the life cycle. And this has a direct impact on the food security for local communities. Sometimes it’s the only source of income they have. So, it’s not only the environmental damage. It’s actually more of a social problem now.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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