Removing Marine Debris Through the Engagement of the Local Commercial Seafood Industry

Commercial seafood industries face many threats including an aging workforce, severe weather, and varying regulations. Another pressing, less obvious concern that commercial fisheries must adapt to is marine debris, defined as any persistent solid material that is manufactured or processed and directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, disposed of or abandoned in the marine environment or the Great Lakes (33 U.S.C. 1951–1958 (2006)). Rodolfich (2023) found that shrimpers in Mississippi currently encounter marine debris in 19% of all tows, and 79% of those encounters were with derelict crab traps. These encounters resulted in direct economic impacts of nearly $1 million per year loss to the Mississippi commercial shrimping industry through lost fishing time and reductions in catch and an additional $78,000 spent due to damage to fishing gear. To alleviate the impacts on the commercial shrimping industry in the Mississippi Sound, a team of natural resource professionals and stakeholders developed a derelict crab trap removal incentive program for commercial shrimpers. In three years, this program led to the removal of 2,904 derelict crab traps from the northcentral Gulf of Mexico at a total average cost of $35,595 per year to implement the program, or $53 per derelict crab trap. Additionally, a developing commercial fishing industry along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast is off-bottom oyster aquaculture. Gear used in this industry is predominantly plastic with types of gear containing metal components. The aquaculture gear is suspended off-bottom either manually with lines attached between pilings and submerged plastic containers or with the assistance of plastic floats that are also secured to lines. Given the nearshore location and off-bottom nature of this gear, it is susceptible to damage or displacement from storms. Many off-bottom farmers will “sink” their gear ahead of storms by either dropping their suspended containers to the floor or filling their floats with water so they will sink. While this practice is relatively successful at preventing mass loss of gear, it does not prevent all of it. As such, the areas surrounding off-bottom oyster farming locations can often be littered with derelict gear and other debris that is hard to find by farmers due to thick vegetation or distance traveled. This gear is expensive, so farmers would like to recover it to redeploy it in their operations. A major barrier to farmers recovering their gear is the uncertainty of derelict gear locations; however, that can be addressed through frequent aerial mapping and sharing of maps and coordinates with oyster farmers. To address these issues a team of commercial fishing, outreach, extension, and research professionals from Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United and Mississippi State University have continued the Derelict Trap Reward Program; built upon the Derelict Trap Reward Program to incentivize collection of plastics and other types of marine debris by shrimpers and other commercial fishing industries; and developed and pilot a derelict gear mapping and recovery program that incentivizes off-bottom oyster aquaculture farmers to recover and reuse gear.