One man’s trash may be another man’s treasure, but in the nation’s waterways, all of man’s trash is a threat to marine life.Whether it’s the whale who died in the Chesapeake Bay recently after swallowing a DVD case or the terrapins that get trapped in ghost crab pots and left to die, non-living things left in the waterways end up hazards to the animals we are trying to protect.
NOAA is addressing this problem, using improved remote-sensing technology that works with the human eye to detect debris. The hope is that, with this technology, finding debris after a disaster like the Asian tsunami will take weeks, not years.
NOAA is also working with various states to remove ghost pots for crabs. These are pots that watermen inadvertently leave behind, and they continue to “fish” for years, trapping terrapins, crabs and other marine life. It is a slow and unpleasant death for these animals. Both Maryland and Virginia have used some of their crab disaster money to hire watermen to fish up these pots, but some scientists had a better idea: build a better trap so it doesn’t come loose in the first place.
What most often happens is that boat propellers run over the buoy that rests on the water and is attached by rope to the crab trap. So the NOAA researchers decided to put different types of buoys in the water and run them over until they found one that wouldn’t break apart. Sarah Latshaw, one of the scientists on board, said they made about 30 runs on each buoy. Sounds like a fun research project, no?
Meanwhile, Virginia has a new marine debris reduction plan, which you can find here.
The Bay Journal’s Leslie Middleton covered those efforts, which you can find here.
And Bay Journal editor Karl Blankenship wrote a terrific story two years ago about the huge numbers of turtles that become trapped in these pots and what we can do about it. Read that here.