Scientists investigate the areas off the coats of California and found tones of debris lying underneath. They also found that recreational fishing gear accounted for 93 per cent of the underwater trash. Diana Watters of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service in Santa Cruz, California, informed that sometimes they had to change the path of the submersible to avoid becoming entangled with recreational fishing lines and nets.
Anthony Jensen, student of National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton, UK, said that this is a really surprising result. According to Watters previous attempts to quantify underwater garbage by trawling with nets have underestimated the true scale of the problem because that method doesn’t pick up all of what’s down there and so cannot provide good information about the density of the debris.
The study also found a number of commercial fishing nets snagged over rocky outcrops. Tom Blasdale, a marine fisheries advisor at the UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee, said that this is worrying, as fishing nets continue to catch and kill fish for years and years after they’ve been lost in the sea. It is fact that abandoned fishing nets pose such a threat to wildlife that one study estimates that lost gill nets can persist for seven years in the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River, where they annually kill a third of all the white sturgeon that could otherwise be commercially harvested.
