What are Ghost Nets?

What are ghost nets? 

Ghost nets are fishing nets that have been left, thrown or abandoned at sea by fisherman. This nets can be left tangled on rocks, reefs, or just drifting out at sea. Then is when they do what they do best. Catching all the passing fish and marine life, restricting movement, causing starvation, laceration and infection and suffocation in those that need to return to the surface to breathe.

As you can imagine, this makes a lot of damage to our oceans. Moreover it is completely unknown to most of the people out there. As bast as our oceans are, you would be surprised about the amount of Ghost Gear there is abandoned in our oceans, putting in danger all sort of life, from little fish and turtles, to big whales and migratory species.

There are NGOs that do a big effort on trying to let the world know about this problem. It is not easy since we are talking about something that is difficult to see by yourself. It is very sad that there are rarely any news regarding this problems. But if we could all put a little bit of our time into this matter, I’m sure we could make a big change on this for the best.

Are there many?

You would be surprised of how many ghost nets there are in our oceans. Most of them are nearly invisible in dim light, and only divers will see them when they get closer to the rocks, or reefs, where they are entangled, and sometimes, they are left drifting in the open ocean.

Some commercial fisherman use Gill nets. These are suspended in the sea by flotation devices.

In this way they can form a vertical wall hundreds of metres long and deep, where any fish within the water column where this net has been set, can be caught. Normally these nets are collected by fishermen and the catch removed.

If this is not done, the net can continue to catch fish until the weight of the catch exceeds the buoyancy of the floats. Then the net sinks, and it becomes a feeding ground for bottom-dwelling crustaceans and other fish. When the nets loses the exceeded weight, then the floats pull up again and the cycle continues.

Given the high-quality synthetics that are used today, the destruction can continue for a long time. That’s why removing this ghostt nets from our oceans its so important.

Why knowing what are ghost nets is important?

Now that we know what are ghost nets, we can learn how to contribute or help to remove them form our oceans.

There are several organisations that have projects on ghost nets retrieval, maybe you local dive centre might have one too!

In my personal experience, in the Mediterranean Sea, there are a lot of ghost nets left on the bottom of the sea, and there is a dive centre which has a nice project to remove this ghost nets.

How can you help?

As an example, Kraken Dive is a dive centre based in Tossa de Mar, a beautiful coastal town in the easter cost of Spain, on which I expended most of my early summer days, and where I actually did my first dives ever! So I have special feelings for this part of the mediterranean and I’m really happy to see that there is people who cares about this beautiful part of the Catalonian coast.

The founder of Kraken Dive have a side project called Ghost Fishing Costa Brava, and what they do is remove as many ghost nets as possible from the local dive sites. You can participate with the ghost net removal when they set out on a specific dive to do this, or you can contribute, also, with a donation so to support the ghost net removal that goes on during the year.

You can donate as well at https://goodnetproject.com/EN to help with ghost net removal, and learn a bit more about them and what damage they do to our oceans.

Hopefully we can work together on cleaning our oceans and make them safer for the marine life and all its habitants.

If you have any questions regarding how can you help with the projects, feel free to leave a comment down below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

Thanks for stoping by and see you all in the blue!!