According to a new survey, the lost fishing gear traps marine organisms for years as it keeps floating in oceans.
To estimate the global fishing gear loss rates and the amount of gear lost every year, research was conducted on 451 fishers from seven countries including Peru, Indonesia and the United States. The fishers were interviewed about the annual fishing gear usage and their losses. It was found that in 65 years there would be enough fishing nets in oceans which can cover the whole planet.
The fishing gear loss in the seas, also termed as ghost gear can cause social, economic and environmental damage. Marine animals die in countless numbers each year from unintentional capture in fishing nets. These lost fishing nets continue to fish indiscriminately for decades.
The research was published in the Journal Science Advances and presents gear loss estimates in proportions and sizes of the fishing gears lost. This study estimated gear losses from large commercial fisheries of marine regions or continents of the world.
The staggering amounts of lost gear, which includes 25 million pots and traps and 14 billion hooks, was likely to have deadly consequences for marine life, one of the study’s authors said.
He further said that enough nets are lost or discarded each year to cover Scotland. If all types of the lost line are tied together, it would be able to stretch around the Earth 18 times.
Dr Denise Hardesty, who is one of the study’s authors said that this is super confronting.
Lost fishing equipment has negative impacts on wildlife, marine and coastal habitats, and food security and causes global marine pollution. Sustainable fisheries are the major contributors to global food security and the economy. But the abandoned and lost fishing gear is proving to be a threat to food security and supplies tons of waste to the oceans every year.
“This is having an unimaginable toll of unknown deaths that could result in population-level effects for marine wildlife, ” he further added.
The research found that nearly 2 per cent of all fishing gear, which includes 2963 km2 of gillnets, 75,049 km2 of purse seine nets, 218 km2 of trawl nets, 739,583 km of longline mainlines, and more than 25 million pots and traps become ALDFG (Abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear) annually.
It was also estimated that every year 1.7 percent to 4.6 percent of land based plastic waste also goes to the sea which adds to the lost fishing gear.
The researchers conveyed the relationship between the gear loss, vessel, bottom contact and size of the gear. It was found that the number of fishing gear lost from small vessels was far more than those lost from larger fishing vessels. The reasons were found to be the high-quality gear tools and technology used on larger vessels. Also, higher amounts of gear loss were observed from bottom trawl nets than the midwater nets. Moreover, the research revealed that fishing gear loss can be influenced by the environment also.
Nevertheless, the proportions of the fishing gear loss, in general, were found to be much lower with context to the previous global meta-analysis-2019. The improvements in the quality of the gear and the better vessel technology were among the few reasons for these differences.
Kelsey Richardson, a lead author from the University of Tasmania, said that the detailed estimates should help fisheries managers, conservationists and the commercial fishing sector to better target solutions.
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