A diver from the Emerald Sea Protection Society hovers over two abandoned fishing traps in B.C.'s Alert Bay, north of Vancouver Island, this past October.Markus Thompson
Of all the plastic pollution in the oceans, lost fishing gear is the worst. The equipment – nets, longlines and traps – is designed to ensnare marine creatures, and it is engineered to last for decades.
Known as ghost gear when they’re left behind, these items perpetually and indiscriminately kill anything they snag, from crabs and fish to birds and marine mammals. And finding them is incredibly difficult. To do so in the Pacific Ocean, for instance, divers must search an immense and dark underwater territory that is often cursed by extreme weather and strong currents.
“Often we’ll find big shell piles and bone piles under the nets, from animals that have been caught and eaten or essentially dissolved,” said commercial diver Bourton Scott.
Bourton Scott, right, and volunteers sort through items found at a public dock in Sooke, B.C., on World Oceans Day in 2020.Allison Stocks
Mr. Scott is a founder of the Emerald Sea Protection Society, a Vancouver-based non-profit that removes abandoned, lost and discarded fishing gear from the waters off British Columbia’s 25,000 kilometres of coastline. It is a passion project with no full-time employees, but since 2017, Emerald Sea’s crews have retrieved more than 55,000 kilograms of ghost gear.
Mr. Scott, who began Emerald Sea after his work as a diver exposed him to the damage caused by ghost gear, holds onto animal remains he finds during cleanups – as a visceral reminder of why he started the organization. “I have jars and jars of bones and stuff from every project,” he said.
One of Mr. Scott’s earliest projects was helping to retrieve a large net that had been used for salmon fishing, but was lost off of Pender Island, in British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. For at least 50 years, the net sat deep below the surface, attached to a pinnacle of rock that would normally be teeming with marine life.
It took several expeditions to remove the net, given the challenges of deepwater diving, the risks of entanglement, and the sheer bulk of the net, which measured 25,000 square metres.
Large nets are just part of the problem Emerald Sea targets.
There are also longlines – synthetic rope that can have thousands of baited hooks spread out along the length.
And then there are traps designed to catch crabs and other bottom-dwellers. Mr. Scott recently completed a two-week-long harbour cleanup off the north end of Vancouver Island and, as he worked, he observed a pattern. The number of crabs trapped in abandoned pots would increase over a span of days. Then the numbers would dwindle as most of the crabs were cannibalized by their fellow inmates. Then the pots would fill up again.
Gear can be lost or abandoned for a variety of reasons – it can get caught up with other vessels and their gear, or it can snag on submerged features. The vagaries of marine weather can sweep away gear, or prompt crews to dispose of their gear when retrieval becomes dangerous.
Ghost gear is an internationally recognized challenge. Canada is regarded as a leader in its efforts to tackle the problem, said Joel Baziuk, associate director of the Global Ghost Gear Initiative. The international agency brings together the fishing industry, non-profits, governments and academics to tackle the issue.
“Canada is really at the bleeding edge when it comes to directly trying to address this problem in a global context,” he said in an interview. “It is in the top two or three in the world for doing this work in a systematic way, with a dedicated program.”
That program, the Ghost Gear Fund, has delivered almost $58-million to date for cleanup projects. Collectively, those projects have retrieved more than 1,900 tonnes of fishing gear and aquaculture debris in the Pacific and Atlantic regions, both in fresh and salt water.
Mr. Baziuk said there are no reliable data on the amount of ghost gear in the oceans, “but we can say unequivocally that everywhere we look for it, it is there. If there’s fishing, there’s some amount of unavoidable gear loss.”
All commercial harvesters in Canada are required to report their lost fishing gear to Fisheries and Oceans Canada. But contemporary gear loss is not the bulk of the problem. Mr. Scott rarely sees nets that are less than 10 years old. B.C.’s once-mighty fishing industry is a shadow of its former self, and there are few around today who can say where the old nets lie.
Emerald Sea president Allison Stocks emerges from the water with Mr. Scott at a dock cleanup in Tofino in 2019. Volunteers removed more than 1,300 kilograms of material.Clover Fedoriuk-Russell
The U.S. non-profit Northwest Straits Foundation is roughly the equivalent of Emerald Seas, but active on the U.S. side of the Juan de Fuca Strait.
While Canada has a refined plan, the U.S. has scale. Northwest Straits has access to millions of dollars annually, allowing it to take on bigger projects.
Jason Morgan, the foundation’s marine projects manager, said his agency has secured stable funding in part by making a case for the return on investment. Simply put, restoration helps commercial fisheries. When nets are lost, most settle on the sea floor, which is critical marine habitat. “Removing the nets almost immediately restores the habitat,” he said.
An academic study looking at ghost gear in the Pacific Northwest concluded that for every U.S. dollar spent retrieving lost gear, at least US$14 worth of Dungeness crab would be saved – increasing the stock available to the commercial fishing industry. That assessment is seven years out of date, and the value of the catch has only increased.
Since 2002, Northwest Straits Foundation has removed more than 5,800 nets. According to its modelling, that has saved 12 million animals each year, including 2,200 marine mammals. And it has restored 870 acres of marine habitat. In 2015, it celebrated the successful cleanup of Puget Sound.
Could B.C. mimic that kind of targeted success? A University of Victoria graduate of environmental studies, Caitlin Frenkel, published her thesis on where most of the gear would have been lost, based on dockside and online surveys of commercial fishermen on B.C.’s West Coast. From that, she produced a map that shows the three most promising clusters for lost gear: along the north and south ends of the Hecate Strait near Haida Gwaii, in Clayoquot Sound, and in the Strait of Georgia along the east coast of southern Vancouver Island.
Lost fishing gear
By type
Trap
Line
Haida Gwaii
Net
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Pacific Ocean
Vancouver
Island
Vancouver
160km
Victoria
WASH.
the globe and mail, Source: Marine Pollution Bulletin,
caitlin frenkel et al
Lost fishing gear
By type
Trap
Line
Haida Gwaii
Net
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Pacific Ocean
Vancouver
Island
Vancouver
160km
Victoria
WASH.
the globe and mail, Source: Marine Pollution Bulletin,
caitlin frenkel et al
Lost fishing gear
By type
Trap
Line
Haida Gwaii
Net
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Pacific Ocean
Vancouver
Island
Vancouver
160km
Victoria
WASH.
the globe and mail, Source: Marine Pollution Bulletin, caitlin frenkel et al
While the research is helpful, it still amounts to looking for needles in a vast haystack – by volunteers who don’t always have time to look.
Emerald Sea is the province’s leading agency in this field, with a vessel equipped with side-scan sonar and an ROV – remotely operated vehicle – to help locate gear. But it is run by people who still have to work at day jobs to make ends meet.
Allison Stocks, president of Emerald Sea, works full-time for Parks Canada. “I love knowing that what we do directly helps ecosystems in the ocean,” she said. But, she added, there is no overarching program of priorities on the coast, and there is just a loose network of local groups doing what they can.
“It’s kind of, wherever we can, wherever the energy is, wherever we can kind of drum up something that works from all angles, then that’s what we’ll go do.”