"Ghost pots" kill crabs - and more
The roundup last winter by Virginia watermen of derelict crab pots found there are plenty of them lurking in the Chesapeake Bay - and they keep catching and killing crabs, and other aquatic life.
Virginia paid out-of-work crabbers $300 a day plus fuel to scour the bay bottom for the "ghost pots,"as they're known - wire-mesh crab traps that get lost when cut loose from their markers by storms or passing boats. Using side-imaging sonar, they found and retrieved more than 8,600, according to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, which set up and supervised the effort. They also collected 61 abandoned fishing nets, plus assorted other debris, including a baby stroller.
The pots evidently keep catching years after they've been lost. As seen in this photo from VIMS, the recovered pots held almost 5,000 crabs and other animals, including fish, eels, turtles, a duck and a muskrat. Scientists figure each derelict pot, if still functional, can catch and kill up to 50 crabs a year.
If that many abandoned pots were found in Virginia waters of the bay, how many might there be in Maryland?
in crabs
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I report on the environment and Chesapeake Bay. A native of West Virginia, I have focused mainly on Maryland's environment since moving here in 1983. Along the way, I've crewed aboard a skipjack in the bay, canoed under city streets up the Jones Fall from the Inner Harbor, and gone deep underground in a western Maryland coal mine. Recently, I have been covering the growth and development transforming the landscape. I love seafood, rambles in the country and good stories. I hope to share some here.
Comments
It's shameful that Virginia is becoming the model for how to approach the bay and its fisheries: dredging curtailed, oyster leasing, and now physical cleanup.
Posted by: zoltan | May 12, 2009 10:09 AM
Great article.Good to see action on this serious problem.
Washington state deals with this problem by requiring the use of cotton twine in trap construction Lost traps eventually.degrade enough to allow escape. Not perfect but a cheap easy retrofit. Might this approach work in the bay?
Posted by: dan mack | May 12, 2009 10:47 AM
For $300 a day, I will go out in a boat and collect lost pots. Sign me up.
Posted by: bdc | May 12, 2009 9:59 PM
To reply to an earlier post about VA and its fisheries management; MD banned crab dredging many years ago. VA is also home to the Menhadden reduction fishery, the second largest fishery in the US which has many consequences for bay predators and algae consumption. VA leads MD in commercial oyster aquaculture, but is not a leader in the field. VA does deserve credit for the ghost pot removal by waterman, MD should follow suit. Both states have good programs, but both continue to fail to work together towards a real solution.
Posted by: pb | May 13, 2009 1:33 PM
Ghost crab pots result largely when other boaters (recreational or commercial!) cut the rope or "warp" used to buoy the devices. Watermen have no way to recover the lost equipment. New Jersey makes crabbers set TEN connected pots with a buoy at each end of the string, making 80% FEWER buoys to steer around. If one buoy's lost the other retrieves all ten pots. With two buoys lost, ten connected pots (with the crabbers keeping GPS coordinates) are quite easy to snag up with a dragged grappling hook run across the traps' alignment. Less gear, less buoys, less losses. Makes sense to me!
Posted by: Kent Mountford | May 14, 2009 2:34 PM