The Nets That Never Stop Killing: Inside America's Fight Against Ghost Fishing Gear

A gillnet does not know when it has been abandoned. Engineered to trap fish by their gills as they attempt to swim through its near-invisible mesh, it continues performing that function whether a fishing vessel is attached to it or not. When a net is lost at sea — swept away by a storm, cut loose to avoid a coast guard inspection, or simply left when a vessel is decommissioned — it begins a new and far more sinister career as what marine scientists call derelict fishing gear.

These ghost nets, along with lost crab pots, longlines, fish traps, and monofilament line, constitute what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has identified as one of the most destructive categories of marine debris in U.S. waters.

The Scale of the Problem

Quantifying ghost gear is inherently difficult — by definition, it is equipment that has disappeared from official records. But the available estimates are sobering. The World Animal Protection organization has calculated that approximately 640,000 metric tons of fishing gear enter the world's oceans each year. A significant portion of that total comes from the heavily fished waters of the North Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic seaboard — all of which fall within or adjacent to American jurisdiction.

In the Pacific Northwest alone, Washington State's Department of Fish and Wildlife has documented tens of thousands of derelict crab pots on Puget Sound's floor over the past two decades. A single lost crab pot, studies have shown, can continue catching and killing Dungeness crab for years, with each decomposing carcass attracting new victims in a cycle of passive mortality that researchers call the "lure effect."

Modern commercial nets are constructed primarily from nylon and other synthetic polymers — materials that resist degradation in the marine environment for anywhere from 400 to 600 years. A net lost off the coast of Alaska in the 1980s may still be actively fishing today.

Why Gear Gets Abandoned

To address ghost fishing effectively, it is necessary to understand the economic and regulatory conditions that produce it. Gear loss is not always intentional. Severe weather events, entanglement with seafloor structures, and collisions with other vessels account for a meaningful share of derelict equipment. Fishermen, particularly those operating smaller vessels on tight margins, often lack the financial resources or the logistical capacity to retrieve gear that has been lost in deep water or swept into hazardous locations.

But a substantial portion of ghost gear results from deliberate abandonment. Damaged or end-of-life equipment is expensive to transport and dispose of responsibly. In ports where disposal infrastructure is inadequate or fees are prohibitive, the temptation to simply cut loose old gear rather than haul it ashore is significant. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing operations — which operate outside the reach of fishery management systems — have even less incentive to recover lost equipment.

Regulatory enforcement in U.S. federal waters has historically been inconsistent. The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act provides a framework for fishery sustainability, but its provisions related to gear marking, retrieval obligations, and derelict gear liability have not always been applied with the rigor that the problem demands.

Who Is Fighting Back

Against this backdrop, a network of organizations is doing the difficult, often dangerous work of pulling ghost gear from American waters.

The Northwest Straits Foundation, based in Washington State, has coordinated one of the most sustained derelict gear removal programs in the country. Over more than two decades of operation, the foundation's dive teams and partner organizations have retrieved over 13,000 derelict crab pots and hundreds of miles of monofilament line from Puget Sound. Their work has documented the recovery of marine life in areas cleared of ghost gear — a tangible demonstration that removal efforts produce measurable ecological benefits.

NOAA's Marine Debris Program provides federal coordination and funding for removal initiatives across all U.S. coastal regions, from the Florida Keys to the Alaskan Aleutian Islands. The program has supported community-based removal projects that engage commercial fishermen directly — a strategy that has proven more effective than enforcement-only approaches at reducing voluntary abandonment.

On the technology frontier, several startups and research institutions are exploring how autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and remotely operated robots can locate and map derelict gear in deep-water environments where human divers cannot safely operate. These systems use sonar imaging and machine learning algorithms trained on the visual signatures of common gear types to identify targets on the seafloor. While still in relatively early stages of deployment, robotic retrieval technology holds considerable promise for reaching the large volumes of ghost gear that currently sit beyond the practical reach of conventional removal methods.

Turning Recovered Gear Into Something New

One of the more compelling developments in the ghost gear space is the emergence of closed-loop recycling systems that convert recovered fishing equipment into commercially valuable materials. Discarded nylon nets, which constitute a large share of recovered ghost gear by weight, can be processed into a high-quality recycled nylon fiber marketed under trade names such as ECONYL. This regenerated material has found its way into American sportswear, swimwear, and carpet manufacturing — creating an economic rationale for recovery that goes beyond environmental obligation.

Programs that pay fishing communities for recovered gear — essentially creating a market for derelict equipment — have shown promise in pilot projects along the Gulf Coast and in New England. By attaching a dollar value to responsible disposal, these initiatives address the core economic incentive that drives abandonment in the first place.

The Regulatory Path Forward

Material progress on ghost fishing will require more than voluntary action and isolated recovery projects. Several policy levers deserve serious consideration from U.S. lawmakers and fishery managers.

Mandatory gear marking and tracking — requiring all commercial fishing equipment to carry identification tags linked to vessel registration — would dramatically improve accountability and simplify the attribution of derelict gear to specific operators. GPS-enabled buoy technology, already commercially available, could extend this tracking to subsurface equipment in real time.

Gear deposit schemes, modeled on bottle deposit programs, would require fishing operations to post a financial bond redeemable upon documented disposal of end-of-life equipment. This approach has been piloted in several European fisheries with encouraging results.

Strengthened port reception facilities — the infrastructure that allows fishermen to offload waste gear at no cost — would remove one of the most commonly cited practical barriers to responsible disposal. NOAA's existing port reception program serves as a foundation, but its geographic coverage and funding levels have not kept pace with the scale of need.

The oceans that American fishing communities depend upon for their livelihoods are being quietly undermined by the gear those same communities leave behind. Solving the ghost fishing crisis will require the fishing industry, federal regulators, environmental organizations, and consumers to treat abandoned gear not as an invisible problem but as the urgent, tractable challenge that the science clearly shows it to be.