Nearly two per cent of all fishing gear, comprising 2,963 km of gillnets, 75,049 km of purse seine nets, 218 km of trawl nets, 7,39,583 km of longline mainlines, and more than 25 million pots and traps are lost in the ocean at the cost of wildlife, marine, coastal habitats and food security.
Business as usual means that the amount of longline fishing gear littering the ocean each year can circle the Earth more than 18 times within 65 years, warns the shocking finding based on the interview of 450 fishers from seven of the world’s biggest fishing countries like Peru, Morocco and the US.
India, which has a 7,516.6 km long coastline covering nearly 6,100 km of land, has not been included in the data, which has come directly from fishers themselves. The findings will help highlight where to focus efforts to stem the tide of fishing pollution as well as save endangered marine species like turtles from getting entangled in the nets and abandoned fishing gears.
It can also help inform fisheries management and policy interventions from local to global scales. The study is published in the journal SciencesAdvances .
In fact, the loss to marine life could be more than what is being estimated given that these data cover only commercial fisheries, and don’t include the amount of fishing line and other gear lost by recreational fishers, said the authors Kelsey Richardson, Britta Denise Hardesty, Joanna Vince and Chris Wilcox, all from Centre for Marine Socioecology, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
The researchers also estimate that between 1.7 per cent and 4.6 per cent of all land-based plastic waste travels into the sea. This amount likely exceeds lost fishing gear.
Nearly 700 species of marine life are known to interact with marine debris, many of which are near threatened. Australian and US researches in 2016 found fishing gear poses the biggest entanglement threats to marine fauna such as sea turtles, marine mammals, seabirds and whales.
Other marine wildlife including sawfish, dugong, hammerhead sharks and crocodiles are also known to get entangled in fishing gear. Other key problematic items include balloons and plastic bags.
Lost fishing gear is not only an environmental risk, it also has an economic impact for the fishers themselves. Every metre of lost net or line is a cost to the fisher not only to replace the gear but also in its potential catch, the study listed.