Reduce, reuse, recover
A new cleanup program recoups 10 tons of fishing gear from local waters
By Saundra Sorenson 01/04/2007
While coastal cleanup efforts statewide are effective, most of them stop at the waterline. The University of California, Davis, however, taking its cues from pre-existing programs in Washington state and Hawaii, engineered a program that takes trash collecting a step forward.
Through an almost statewide cooperative network, the California Derelict Fishing Gear Removal Project, managed by UC Davis Wildlife Health Center’s SeaDoc Society, has replaced the usual T-shirt-clad cadre of volunteer trash collectors with volunteer scuba divers who have, so far, recovered almost 10 tons of waste in the Channel Islands area — specifically, the waters between the mainland and Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, Anacapa and Santa Catalina islands — by diving to depths of up to 100 feet.
Recovered items include gear and nearly 250 commercial lobster traps, as well as one item of particular danger to wildlife and divers alike: abandoned fishing nets. Volunteers recently recovered a 5,000 square-foot model from the ocean floor that weighed two tons.
This is not a case of random diving, but a cooperative effort between organizers and fishermen to improve the program’s efficacy. After methods were tested by divers at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific and Humboldt State University, three commercial fishermen from Santa Barbara and San Diego signed on to use underwater scooters and scuba gear to find debris. Once located, refuse is brought up with float bags and winches, then taken on shore.
In keeping with the program’s conservational bent, not every piece of trash is trashed. Any usable piece of equipment is passed on to fishermen. It is the hope pf the program’s founders that the full-circle nature of this system will attract the participation of those in the fishing industry, and organizers hope to foster “volunteer reporting.” It is to their benefit: Lobster traps cost anywhere from $60 to $100 and, of the hundreds of traps recovered, the majority were reusable and passed on.
Interestingly, the program has also unintentionally provided field study for lobster trap designs. Newer traps contain doors with hinges that disintegrate under water, meaning that a renegade trap won’t accidentally confine lobsters — a phenomenon referred to as “ghost fishing.” Volunteers report that, while older traps did contain live lobsters, the newer models were without doors, effectively allowing lobsters to escape.
The first run of the program began last May and continued through October, and included volunteers from San Diego, Santa Barbara, Long Beach and Humbolt.
The program is funded by California’s Ocean Protection Council, through the California State Coastal Conservancy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Marine Debris Program.
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