Over the last two years, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s TRAP program — Fishing Trap, Removal, Assessment and Prevention — has recovered more than 24,000 abandoned fishing traps.
The retrieval of the underwater garbage, which weighed a collective 600,000 pounds, has supported more than 135 jobs and documented nearly 36,000 trapped marine animals.
In their latest round of funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science allocated $225,000 to local watermen to aid in the removal of abandoned fishing gear in the Chesapeake Bay, which stretches 200 miles from Maryland to Virginia.
The Chesapeake Bay, which is the largest estuary in the United States, produces one-third of the nation’s total blue crab supply — and the bay waters are littered with abandoned crab pots.
“These crab pots [are] also known as ghost traps,” environmental reporter Lauren Hines-Acosta explained to the Bay Journal Delmarva Pubic Media. “Sometimes they’re just lost or they’re not checked anymore, abandoned, and critters can still get in there and they can't escape and they don't get harvest. So they just die really for no reason.”
“So cleaning up the crab traps can help with the local populations that there’s not any bycatch that wouldn’t be going towards a harvest. They can also disrupt habitats and they can be navigational hazards too for both.”
The funds will go to two TRAP program projects that center on the retrieval of blue crab pots from two arms of the bay, the Herring Bay and the Eastern Bay.
“There’s two companies, the Oyster Recovery Partnership and Raunch Inc.,” Hines-Acosta said. “They’re going to be working with the local watermen in their area to identify and remove the blue crab traps since they would know what they look like best.”
“And they’re likely on the water more often to know where some of these traps might be,” she reasoned.
The Virginia Institute of Marine Science led similar efforts from 2008 to 2014, where they removed roughly 34,000 ghost traps.
“That’s how the institute became leader of the nationwide project,” Hines-Acosta said.
Since 2019, Ocean Aid 360 has hosted an annual “ghost trap” rodeo, where locals compete in a tournament-style event to fish abandoned gear out of Gulf waters.
“It’s just like your favorite inshore fishing tourney, but instead of redfish and trout, we’ll be weighing in collected plastics, derelict crab traps, and other forms of marine debris after your four-hour search,” Ocean Aid 360 posted to Facebook ahead of their latest rodeo event in August.
According to the organization, the event was open to “anglers, boaters, paddlers, and shoreline walkers.”
“To date, OA360 has organized 18 cleanups around Florida and has weighed in close to 150,000 pounds of marine debris,” Ocean Aid 260 said.
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