The Decibel - The ‘ghost gear’ strangling Canada’s marine wildlife

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Fishing equipment like nets, traps and lines that have been lost or abandoned are a serious problem for marine wildlife. They’re designed to trap sea creatures, and to last a long time. It’s called ghost gear, and Canada is leading the charge in efforts to clean it up. But it is challenging and often dangerous work.Today, The Globe’s BC reporter Justine Hunter explains how all this fishing gear ended up at the bottom of our oceans in the first place, why it’s so destructive to wildlife and what the obstacles are in trying to clean it up.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The first time I saw bone piles was on our first recovery. That's Burton Scott, a diver and one of the founders of the Emerald Sea Protection Society in B.C. And yes, you heard right. He said bone piles that are stuck beneath a fishing net in the ocean. The bone piles under that particular net were quite extensive. It was, the net itself was 1200 feet long by 600 feet long, draped right over top of a rocky spire. So there was a fair amount of damage

that had been happening over that period of time. And all the little rocky crags and stuff that you find on subsurface rock piles like that were right full of crab claws, fish bones, some seabirds, probably mammal bones if you spend enough time looking. There's a slew of gear like this, lost or abandoned in our oceans, called ghost gear. And it's a huge problem for wildlife. Everywhere, there has been commercial fishing,

everywhere around the globe, all the coastal communities, over the decades and perhaps over the century or more, we've had this gear lost or abandoned for whatever reason, and it stays underwater and it kills. The Globe's BC reporter, Justine Hunter, has been following the issue of ghost gear in Canada's oceans. Today, she explains how all of this gear got there in the first place, and what the challenges are in trying to clean it up. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Justine, thanks so much for joining me again. Thanks for having me, Manika.

I'm just curious, what made you want to write about ghost gear? So I'm going to take you back to the late 1980s. I was lucky enough to find myself out in an open boat in the Bering Sea, which is north of Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Long story how I got there, but it's just this amazing region for wildlife. And at one point, I remember we were just marveling at this raft of sea lions floating near the shore. But there was one that was slowly being strangled. He had this bit of fishing net around his neck and you could see it was cutting into him as he grew. And there was just absolutely nothing we could do about it. It was awful.

So that's always stayed with me. And when I saw this documentary last fall about people working to clean up this kind of marine waste, I really knew I wanted to write about it. Yeah. Wow. That really, yeah. What a visceral image, right, to see the impact that this can have on a creature like that. I guess we should maybe establish, Justine, when we use the term ghost gear, what exactly do we mean? We're talking about lost or abandoned fishing gear. And in some ways, it's just the worst kind of marine garbage. You've probably heard of the Pacific Garbage Patch. We've been treating our oceans as a garbage dump for God knows how long. And we have these swirling collections of

microplastics and styrofoam and running shoes all floating out there. But fishing gear is designed to ensnare marine creatures and it is engineered to last for decades. So we're talking about nets and traps and long lines. These are these synthetic ropes that are strung along with baited hooks, sometimes thousands of them, and they just perpetually and indiscriminately kill anything they snag. That's what they're good at. So crabs, fish, birds, marine mammals all getting caught.

And it just doesn't stop until that material is retrieved. So it sounds like there's a huge range of stuff. So whenever you're talking like crab pots or lobster traps up to like nets and all kinds of things, do we have a sense of how big this gear can actually be? Well, it can be massive. So there was one net that was pulled off of the waters off Pender Island, and it was 25,000 square meters. So this one net is like the equivalent of several football fields. It's about six acres or two and a half hectares, if you want to do the metric. But that's a massive amount of material there. And just the challenge of bringing it up would have been something. It took them several years

and they had to go at it in pieces to remove that net just because it was too big for any one boat. Yeah, that's huge. Wow. And again, when it's sort of laying on the ocean floor, it's kind of smothering everything beneath it. It's entrapping and just kind of anything that gets caught in it in turn becomes bait and attracts more marine life. So you're kind of getting to this right now, Justine. But I guess I really want to establish, like, why is this gear so damaging overall? So we think about marine garbage floating around. But in fact, most of it settles on the seafloor. And that's critical marine habitat. So when a net settles on the bottom

of the ocean, for example, it's deadly in and of itself. But the good news is when we can find them and remove them, that marine habitat can bounce back. So it's not just like we're talking about animals, but also like the marine ecosystem then essentially. That's right, yeah. It's just kind of smothering everything there or if it's hanging off a reef underwater or imagine those crab traps. I had it described to me that somebody was out working underwater

over a period of time trying to do a cleanup in a harbor and they were watching these crab traps that had been lost. Yeah, so a moment that I can distinctly remember is seeing crab traps, lost crab traps that were absolutely full of crab, were no longer being recovered to surface and cleaned out, that type of thing. And they would fill up over the time, over days, with more crabs climbing in. But eventually, they would just get cannibalized. So there would be down to one crab, and then they would start to fill up again, and the cycle would continue. So this is just an awful

kind of image, I know, but it's that kind of continued killing that's the problem there. Do we have a sense of actually how many animals get caught up in this gear every year? No, we don't. And we don't have really good estimates of how much ghost gear is out there. But anywhere you have fishing industries, so anywhere along a coastline, there's going to be ghost gear. And over time, that stuff continues to build up. So we haven't done a great job of cleaning it up. But when you look at scale, so I talked to a group called Northwest Straits Foundation. They work only in the waters around Washington State. This one group

has removed more than 5,800 nets over the last 20 years or so. And according to their modeling, that has saved 12 million animals each year, including 2,200 marine mammals. So that's just one group doing one small area, and it's millions of animals each year. Yeah. Do we know, like, how is all this gear ending up lost and abandoned in the ocean in the first place? Like, what's going on? So fishing on the coast can be a tough environment and gear gets lost or abandoned for all kinds of reasons. So picture a bunch of fishing boats with nets and they're all converging in one area where the fish are. They've got nets or long lines and they get caught up in other vessels and their gear so they can get entangled in each other.

They can also get snagged on submerged features like a reef. And then you've got marine weather. So you can have storms that can sweep away your gear, or they can force fishing crews to dispose of their gear when the retrieval of those nets becomes dangerous because of a storm. And from what I've learned about this story from talking to the experts is we're not talking so much about purposeful pollution. This gear is really expensive and fishers don't want to come home empty-handed. So it's really, you know, getting lost or being forced to abandon it for reasons beyond their control. Okay. So yeah, this is not like we're trying to do this. It's not being lost on purpose. There are circumstances that happen while fishing that cause these things to be lost.

That's right. We'll be back in a moment. Justine, earlier you mentioned that we don't know really how much ghost gear is in the ocean, but why? Why don't we, I guess, why don't we know how much is out there? Well, this is fishing industry, you know, has been going on, for example, on the West Coast, you know, for more than 100 years. And a lot of this is stuff that was lost decades ago. When I started out in this business, so this is about 35 years ago, the fishing industry in BC was a really big part of the provincial economy. I think one of my first big front page stories that I can remember was when the Fisherman's Union went on strike. This was considered a big deal because they were

very influential. Now that industry barely registers. So what that means is that most of the ghost gear that's being retrieved in our waters is really old, often decades old. So it's great that Canada now requires people to report when they lose gear to help with the retrieval. But what you're talking about is gear lost 50 years ago, and chances are nobody can tell you where it is. So finding it is often just like hunting for a needle in a haystack, except the haystack is a big, dark underwater environment with strong currents. It's very dangerous work.

So this gear is mostly a legacy of a once mighty industry here on the West Coast. Anyways, to me, this is also a reminder that that abundance of our oceans has been depleted and cleaning up some of these messes to me is just like a little penance that's due. Yeah. And so you did touch on the fact that we actually do keep track of lost gear now since 2020, I believe. Do we know then how much fishing gear is actually lost these days? Yeah, this is where I, when I pitched the story, I was thinking of the headline Worthy Canadian Initiative. But actually, when I set out to do this work, it was because I'd seen this work by Washington State to clean up ghost gear. And what I expected to find was that Canada wasn't pulling its weight. So it was

actually a surprise to me that Canada is regarded as a leader in this field because we have this dedicated program and a systematic approach. It's called the Ghost Gear Fund. They've spent about $58 million cleaning up projects. And those projects have retrieved about 1,900 tons of fishing gear and aquatic debris in the Pacific and the Atlantic regions, both in fresh and salt water. So since 2020, so over the last three years of reporting, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has collected a number of reports of gear lost. And the total number of units of material lost was around 58,000. So that's each unit could be a trap or a net or something like that. And of that, only 24,000 has been retrieved to date.

But again, a lot of that is that's the new stuff. We don't have records of what else has being lost over the decades and more than a century of fishing. Yeah. And from that 58,000, do we have a breakdown of, I guess, what kind of gear is being lost out there? Yeah, there's a lot of it is actually lobster and crab. That's a huge part of it. So things like fishing nets is a very small part of it. So it's mostly ground fish that they're going after and crustaceans. And when you talked about the Ghost Gear Fund, this is a government initiative then? This is the worthy Canadian initiative called the Ghost Gear Fund. And so Canada has put more than $50 million into it that they've spent so far, and they're still committed to it, as I understand it, to continuing to do this. So they're still promoting it, and they're still committed to it, as I understand it, to continuing to do this. So they're still promoting it and they're still doing that work.

Off the top of the episode, we heard some clips from diver Burton Scott, who's actually doing some of the work here. What are the challenges, Justine, in actually retrieving this gear? Yeah, I wanted to go out on one of the boats with them to see this firsthand, but I've only had it described to me. But it is very difficult work, often in conditions where you've got tides and currents and weather coming up. You're at risk as a diver of actually getting entangled in the gear yourself. So you have to move slowly and carefully. Often we'll run into a variety of different things in the field of weather, really high currents, low visibility, wildlife, all those things. And then when you're

actually working on the gear, you end up with the high entanglement risk, which every job, somebody gets entangled for a period of time. It's just a reality of the work. But with that experience and the equipment that we use, we've mitigated those risks so that we can actually do it in a way that it's quite safe. But obviously, you know, being entangled in zero visibility and in high current is always a bit of a, raises the heart rate a little bit. The work is done with the assistance,

ideally of remote vehicles, like little submarines that are, you know, can help you spot what's going on and figure it out. But you still need people to get down there and cut things loose and haul it all up. So very noble work that a lot of these people are doing on a volunteer basis. Yeah. And we talked about how we don't exactly know where this is. So how are they going about retrieving this? I mean, that must be something to think about for sure. Yeah, we don't know where it all is, but we know where a lot of it is. I spoke to a graduate student out at the University of Victoria, Caitlin Frankel, and she published her thesis on where most of the gear would have been lost over time. And that was

based on her surveys, both dockside and online, of talking to commercial fishermen off BC's west coast. And from that, she produced this really interesting map that shows the three most promising clusters for lost gear. So that's off the north and south ends of Hecate Strait near Haida Gwaii and in Tlacuat Sound, which is off the west coast of Vancouver Island around Tofino, and in the Strait of Georgia along the east coast of southern Vancouver Island. So that's still a vast area, but we know that there are going to be clusters where there has been a

lot of commercial fishing over time, and a lot of bad weather. Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like we've got, we've certainly got something to work with, though. But it's interesting. I mean, this is the work of a grad student. It's still, you know, institutionally, we haven't really done the work to figure this out. That's right. Canada will, you know, respond, especially when there's been a big storm that's caused a lot of material to be lost. They know where to start in an incident like that. But for historic marine waste, of which there's a lot, we really do have to rely on kind of what we know about old fishing patterns yeah and then the other thing is just kind of this ad hoc thing that's

happening here on the coast where people will reach out and say hey our harbor has a lot of material in it can you come and help us so it's very organic in terms of how these volunteers are able to get their campaigns and work together with local communities to try and clean up harbors. And you said they're volunteers. Why is it, I guess, that it's so reliant on volunteers? Yeah, it's something that probably we need to look at as a future. So Canada's planning to continue to fund these cleanups, but I think there's an opportunity here for this to grow. The support side of this work is always a challenging one.

Our limiting factor is always funding. We work primarily off of grants and the odd bit of private donations sort of stuff, which is likely why you don't see more groups like ours doing work like this. This is still, for our team, very much a passion project where everybody still has full-time jobs and we try our hardest to get as much funding as we can a year to go and do the most that we can. Volunteers are great. I think it's a wonderful way for people to be invested in their environment and their community.

But there's all this expensive gear. You need the right boat. You need to have the right winches. You need to have, ideally, sonar and things that can pick up and spot this gear. We could do worse to publicly support those efforts in a bigger way so that they can do more. I wonder, is the fishing industry also involved in these cleanups? I guess just rather than relying on government volunteers, is the industry itself actually doing these things? Yeah, I think there are some work being done with local, but again, there's not much of a fishing industry, commercial fishing industry to rely on. It's not like if you had started this 30 years ago, there would be some big companies to hit up and say, hey, you need to do your part. So I think it does happen. But it is very much, you know, these organic connections

that are being made. And certainly, you know, Canada has a role in helping to shape this into something that can connect people and make sure we're doing the most efficient work. And also, you know, allowing those communities that want to be part of this to step forward and say, let's work on this together. Obviously, these efforts help the marine environment, help the animals, but I understand there's also a financial incentive here really to do these cleanups, Justine. Can you tell me about that? Somebody sent me an academic study looking at ghost gear in the Pacific Northwest. And it makes a compelling economic argument for spending the money on cleaning this stuff up. So they found,

and this is several years out of date, but every dollar spent retrieving lost gear was worth $14 worth of Dungeness crab alone. So we're talking about improving a marine life, but there's a reason for a commercial fishing industry to invest in this work too, because if, you know, that scale of savings by restoring the environment can be turned into something where they're able to harvest more Dungeness crab, because we've brought them back, then that's a good thing for the economy as well. Yeah. What is the future of ghost gear cleanup look like? Like, what would it, what would it take to get all of this gear out of our oceans?

I think there's a great model that I talked to, again, in the Washington state area, where they picked one harbor and they focused on it in a sustained way and were able to actually celebrate and say that they cleaned up that entire region. And I think that idea of picking targets strategically, saying, okay, this is where the garbage is, this is where we can make a big difference, and then making that coordinated effort to bring community together, volunteers, and government funding, I think would be a great way for people to see how this work is important and to understand why we want to support it. Justine, thank you so much for being here

today. Thanks for having me. So before we go, I've got our producer Rachel in the studio with me. Hey, Rachel. Hey. I just want to say a really quick goodbye to everybody. This is the last episode that I'll produce for a while because I'm going on maternity leave. I love working on this team, love making this show every day. But I'm also very excited to be a regular listener and to get my information about what's going on in the world from this podcast that I love so much. Well, you will be greatly missed, Rachel. It's going to be really strange not having you here, but we're so excited for you and the new journey for your family. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wells. This episode was produced and mixed by Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.