The Ghosts of Puget Sound

Lost fishing gear threatens to trap marine creatures in a watery grave.

Story by Joe Magnani | Photos by Cicada London

March 16, 2022

A Dungeness crab circles a mesh trap, desperate to find a way inside. A pungent cocktail of salmon and chicken carcasses has lured it in, wafting in the current, grabbing the attention of a dozen more crabs in the distance. After finally locating the entrance, the crab skitters inside and munches its prize, not realizing: It’s trapped.

Normally, a crabber would pick up the pot within a few days, but some traps are lost. The current can carry it into deeper waters, pulling down the buoy that marked its spot on the surface. Unknowingly, a hungry crab and others that follow will die of starvation within their metal tomb.

Sitting derelict on the seafloor, such cages perpetuate a cycle of trapping and killing. Over months, empty shells can pile up on the bottom of the trap as more crabs enter to feast on their deceased kin.

The only way to stop this cycle is to either remove the trap completely, or hope part of it falls open, allowing for escape.

Unbeknownst to many, death traps such as this — labyrinths of plasticky netting and wire mesh — haunt Puget Sound, totaling an estimated 117,000 traps and nets. “Ghost” fishing equipment entangles and traps thousands of marine organisms until they eventually decompose, out of sight. This gear drains resources from an already taxed system and threatens the way of life for commercial and recreational fishermen.

These lost supplies have generated concern among the fishing community, state agencies and nonprofits, prompting efforts to clean up the seafloor. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has joined with organizations like the Northwest Straits Foundation (NSF) to study the harm lost fishing gear causes and the best way to collect it.

Abandoned equipment is a problem that will likely never go away, according to Katelyn Bosley, a Fish and Wildlife crustacean biologist.

“[As long as] we have both recreational and commercial pot fisheries with buoys on the surface, there will always be a threat of gear getting lost,” Bosley said.

These pot fisheries, mainly for Dungeness crab, rely on dropping a baited trap to the seafloor that crabs can enter but not escape, which is attached to a buoy that floats on the surface. Traps like these can be lost due to strong tides pushing unweighted pots into deeper water, high tides submerging buoys or unaware boaters cutting buoys loose with their propellers.

Under state law, all shellfish traps — for crab, shrimp or crawfish — are required to have an escape mechanism secured with cotton rope, similar to a trap door. If the pot is lost, this “rot cord” will degrade after several weeks, releasing the trap door and liberating any surviving prisoners trapped inside.

All crab pots are required to have two rings affixed to the side which allow undersized crabs to escape instead of risking damage from larger feeding adults.

The escape mechanism on most of these pots consists of a hatch on the top. When the rot cord releases the hatch, the crab has to perform feats of crab acrobatics — climbing up the side, then climbing upside-down, then pushing the lid-like hatch door up so it can escape. Such taxing feats of strength can be ineffective, especially for starving and weak crabs, according to a 2015 NSF study.

Crabbers can create a more effective escape mechanism by re-securing the escape rings meant for smaller crabs with rot cord. When the cord disintegrates, the rings fall away and allow the larger crabs to escape, said Jason Morgan, marine projects manager at the NSF. This technique can increase the likelihood of escape to almost 100%, as crabs can leave from the side instead of the top, according to Morgan, who worked on the 2015 crab escape study.

The NSF has removed 5,800 nets and more than 6,000 crab pots in northern Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan De Fuca since its formation in 2002. An estimated 12 million marine organisms are tangled up in these nets annually, according to a 2021 report Morgan published. These include invertebrates like Dungeness crabs and octopus, but also birds and over 2,000 marine mammals, such as harbor porpoises and Steller sea lions.

Ghost traps are typically located from a boat using sonar to scan the sea floor. Once areas with a high density of lost gear are identified, a dive team physically removes the gear from areas as deep as 32 meters. Through this process, many of the high concentration areas — like those with rocks that have collected fishing gear garments or where the tide has naturally pushed lost fishing gear together — have been restored.

For removals deeper than 32 meters, cleaners use remotely operated vehicles, but the process is slow and expensive. As technology becomes cheaper, deeper nets may be recovered more easily in the future.

“[Gill nets] are large and designed to capture whatever hits them,” Morgan said. Having seen trapped marine mammals and entangled birds, Morgan can attest to just how damaging a single net can be.

Besides killing marine organisms, derelict fishing gear can also alter underwater habitats by trapping sediment and changing the seafloor landscape. It can cover reefs and rock formations, block habitat for fish and shellfish, and suffocate aquatic plants — all threats to seafloor biodiversity.

Education plays an important role in reducing the amount of lost recreational crabbing gear. Tribal and non-tribal commercial fishing are both responsible for lost fishing gear, but recreational gear losses are also an important part of the issue, according to Karl Mueller, harvest manager for the Lummi Nation.

During the brief recreational crab season each summer, Fish and Wildlife conducts a campaign to remove lost pots with buoys still on the surface. With 12,000 pots lost in Puget Sound each year, every bit of clean-up helps.

Crabbing is gaining popularity among recreational fishing enthusiasts and can be a relatively inexpensive activity to get into. Educating new or relatively inexperienced crabbers about trap rigging, properly weighting pots and tide exchanges means the amount of gear lost every season can be reduced, Bosley said.

While many of the high priority, shallow water area nets have been pulled from the Sound, many remain. Fish and Wildlife will remove nets as they’re reported, but as crabbing popularity increases, ghost gear will continue to haunt the creatures of the Salish Sea.

Joe Magnani is an environmental studies student at Western. He enjoys exploring the outdoors and staying active on environmental issues in the Salish Sea region.