What is ghost gear?
Ghost gear is scary. It’s the name given to fishing nets and ropes that have been lost or abandoned at sea and are not under the control of a fisher anymore. They drift, untethered, silent and often unseen, a deadly menace to whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, seabirds and other marine life.
It’s time to make the UK ghost gear free.
When a whale or dolphin gets tangled in ghost gear, it can kill them in the most horrific way, by preventing them from getting to the surface to breathe. Or they can carry it for days, weeks or even months suffering a slow and painful death as it cuts into their skin, restricts their movement and hampers their ability to hunt and feed.
When a whale eats this deadly gear, it can block or cut their digestive system, leading to bleeding and infections that stop nutrients being absorbed properly. This can all lead to more plastic building up in the whale’s system, eventually killing them.
Without urgent action, countless more individuals will suffer slow, painful deaths.
How big is the problem?
We don’t know exactly how much ghost gear is in the ocean, or how many whales and dolphins it kills each year. But we know that the scale of the problem is frightening and that we need urgent action to start to remove it from the ocean and prevent more ending up there.
We also know:
It’s a problem all over the world but, as an organisation we need to start somewhere, so we’re focussing our efforts close to home with our new campaign to make the UK ghost gear free.
Who’s to blame?
It might be easy to point the finger at fishers, but it’s difficult and expensive for them and other ocean users to dispose of gear they find at sea, or even to responsibly get rid of their own gear at the end of its life or net cuttings from repairs they’ve made out on their boats.
Ghost gear isn’t always carelessly dumped—often, it’s just too difficult or expensive to remove.
The responsibility for cleaning up this mess lies firmly at the feet of the UK governments. Currently, there’s no incentive for fishers to bring in their gear when it’s reached the end of its life, or to recover gear they find at sea. If a fisher spots an abandoned or lost net in the ocean, they will probably incur considerable personal expense if they bring it to shore. We spoke to one fisher who recalled finding a massive trawl net lost or abandoned at sea off Cornwall. He didn’t bring it in because he would have needed to hire a crane to lift it from his boat and that would have cost him upwards of £3,000. He felt terrible leaving it in the ocean because he knew the danger it posed. But he couldn’t afford to bring it in.
No one takes responsibility
Nets can be enormous. Trawl nets, for example, can be many kilometres wide. They may contain all kinds of different materials, such as plastic, rubber and metal, so recycling is not simple. Fishers are faced with different systems for waste reception at different harbours – there’s no consistent approach. Plus, there are so many different stakeholders involved, from local councils to government, port authorities to coastguards, net manufacturers to fishers, that the government just points the finger of responsibility at different groups and no one takes ownership.
The government must take responsibility
As well as killing whales, dolphins and other marine wildlife, ghost gear wreaks havoc in all kinds of ways that you might not even have thought about. It can smother the seabed, damage coral reefs, bring invasive species into areas, get wrapped around the foundations of wind turbines, clog up industrial machinery and get tangled in boat propellors. Its impact is huge. We can’t get the government to act based on the unquantifiable danger to whales and dolphins alone, but we can show them this much bigger problem and put a financial cost to our economy on it.
Harming habitats and hurting economies - ghost gear’s impact goes far beyond whales and dolphins.
The UK government refuses to see this issue as a priority, but there are simple steps they can take to address the problem and save lives. The law must be changed to make it free to dispose of all fishing gear at all UK harbours and to make sure that all UK harbours have adequate waste reception and processing systems to deal with gear that is brought in. We are lagging woefully behind the EU which already has this legislation in place.
What we’ve already achieved together
With your support, we’ve already undertaken a huge research project, compiling information to brief the government and recommend practical action. That’s not all …
But there’s more we can do. In the short term, we’re funding Ghost Fishing UK to find and remove lost and abandoned gear from UK waters so it’s not a danger to whales, dolphins and other wildlife anymore. You can help fund their missions too by taking on a fitness fundraising challenge and turning your steps into ocean action — just click here to get started. Stay tuned over the coming weeks as we share updates on the impact of your support when the team returns from their retrieval missions.
And looking ahead, we need to gather more evidence on the economic impact of ghost gear, map the UK ghost gear hotspots, bring the diverse groups of stakeholders together to discuss solutions together, and lobby for the legislation we need. Thanks for your support. Together, we will make the UK ghost gear free.