Ghost Pots Haunt Bering Sea Crab Fishery
The ocean has many woes. Over-fishing, acidification, heavy metals, plastic and styrofoam, oil spills, marine mammal endangerment, mining near water bodies, and climate change, just to name some of them. But here’s one you don’t hear about very often that affects one of our favorite gifts from the sea – Alaska crab.
For those who have never seen a crab pot, they are huge metal and net contraptions that cost between $1000 and $1500 a piece. They sit on the sea floor, collecting and trapping crab that dwell on the bottom. They are secured by heavy lines and marked by large floating buoys.
This year, record-breaking heavy ice in the Bering Sea cut many of those heavy lines, and dragged pots long distances from where they were dropped. By the end of snow crab season, Bering Sea fishermen had lost about 800 crab pots – three times more than in the past two seasons, and a full 6% of their total gear. And for those of you doing the math, that’s between $800,000 and $1.2 million worth of equipment.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Britta Baechler says says that in addition to the sea ice that wreaked havoc with the gear, this year’s doubling of the snow crab quota was probably also a factor.
“So we kind of expected that a few more pots might be lost, but we certainly weren’t expecting this much gear to be left in the water.”
Not only does the situation create bad news for the bottom line, it also creates bad news for the bottom of the sea. These lost “ghost pots” continue their work of fishing the ocean floor, for months, trapping crab and other marine life.
Seafood.com reports: Fish and Game biometrician Bill Gaeumen says it’s hard to say for sure what happens to those animals, but, “common sense suggests that if you trap animals in a place where they can’t go about their business for long enough, it’s probably not good.”
The pots do have a built-in ‘safety valve’ of sorts – a patch of cotton twine that biodegrades over time, leaving a hole that animals can enter and exit. But Gaeumen says it can take months for the twine to degrade and in the meantime, animals can pile up inside the pots.
“Clearly we don’t want crab being killed off, just for no reason like that. Lost to the fishery, to the the ecosystem. All those things considered, it’s not a good thing to be murdering off crab out there. We just don’t know how extensive that could be.”
Gaeuman also says that in terms of how these ghost pots affect the population of crab in the Bering Sea, there is no good information. The estimates of the number of ghost pots vary widely, but it’s likely in the tens of thousands.
What are the effects of the ghost pots on the sustainability of the fishery? What will this do to the quotas that crabbers will have in years to come? These low-tech but deadly devices create much the same problems as bycatch in the fisheries at the surface – wanton waste that throws the natural ecosystem off-kilter, and renders useless a valuable renewable resource, even as we seek to take more from the ocean.
It seems there is a business opportunity here: to devise a method of creating an escape panel that degrades faster than the well-intentioned but horribly antiquated cotton twine method. Of course, any new design would not only have to degrade quickly, it would also have to hold up to the rigors of commercial crabbing. But there’s gotta be something….
The ocean is our lifeblood, quite literally. I don’t know if anyone else remembers going to assembly in school and sitting through “Hemo the Magnificent,” but I do; our blood and lymph reflect the ocean from which we all evolved. Although the only seafood I eat is sea vegetables (just as the only land food I eat is plants), I am committed to the health of our oceans, as are all environmentalists.
This is a great place to start if you want to get involved: http://oceana.org/en and The Mudflats’ contributor Rick Steiner is up for an Ocean Hero award (yes, you remember correctly, I nominated him, although I’m sure many others did as well). Voting ends soon, so visit Oceana’s Facebook page to vote.
At first, I was confused by the title of this post, because when I visited the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, I became acquainted with ghost crabs. I’m not at all familiar with snow crabs. I hope there’s a workable solution to the problem of gear retrieval, and I hope it’s implemented sooner rather than later.
Snow crabs are at maturity 6 to 8 inches wide and white. They are not considered dangerous. Their preferred winter habitat In Southcentral Alaska is the large berms pushed up by snowplows along roads and highways. In the summer snow crabs retreat up mountainsides to at least 3000 feet, or in some places to snowfields atop glaciers; these snowfields are sometimes at lower elevations and even close to sea level. The snow crabs are rarely seen, except by biologists who understand their camoflauge and habitat. Most field guides describe the mating call of the female snow crab as “chilling.” The main predator is the snowy owl.
This is a real and abiding problem worldwide
http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/19353/icode/
“Traps and pots are another major ghost fisher. In the Chesapeake Bay of the United States, an estimated 150 000 crab traps are lost each year out of an estimated 500 000 total deployed. On just the single Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, about 20 000 of all traps set each year are lost each hurricane season – a loss rate of 50 percent. Like gill nets, these traps can continue to fish on their own for long periods of time.”
California has a retrieval program which helps some.
Do we?
Haven’t heard of one but that doesn’t mean it’s not out there.
I have to speak up for my late father, Ole Harder, who came up with the idea of the biodegradable panels and worked to see them become law. In those days he had also fought hard to limit the number of king crab pots to 150 per boat, yet he was still worried about ghost pots at that number. Yet 150 pots per boat provided a good living to 100x the families who now are employed in the industry. Corporatism and greed people, corporatism and greed…
Thank you for your comment Kristine! Hats off to your father for a great idea, and a perceptive daughter.
This was an interesting story, but misleading on the actual facts. For over 30 years, the crab fishermen have been required to utilize a biodegradable twine that will break within 30 days, allowing all crab in the pots to escape. The ADF&G studies concluded that 30 days was an appropriate amount of time in order to ensure that lost pots would NOT ghost fish. Some of the quotes in the article are not consistent with the regulations and scientific understanding that ADF&G has regarding how long lost pots can continue fishing. As a representative of crab harvesters, I can say that this is frustrating for crabbers in that they comply with the twine requirements and are as concerned about the issue of lost pots as anyone. I would hope that ADF&G would clarify the comments made and correct the record.