Law to get rid of ‘ghost traps’ paying off

Marty Schladen, The Daily News, Galveston County 23 Feb 08;

State officials are reporting excellent results six years into a program to cut down on marine life needlessly killed in abandoned crab traps.

That’s demonstrated by a radical drop in the number of rogue traps that volunteers and state workers are finding these days as they go out and collect them.

Through today, the Texas crab fishery is closed. For the past week, workers and volunteers have been removing traps left in the water during the closure.

Anybody with a fishing license can go to Academy, buy a crab trap, bait it and drop it in Galveston Bay. But if you don’t regularly check it, it can cause serious environmental harm.

Called “ghost traps” they attract crabs and other animals. As they die, the first to be trapped attract still more animals. The cycle repeats.

“It’s not just crabs that die,” said John Embesi, a marine biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Artificial Reef program.

River otter, diamondback terrapin, musk turtle and black drum have all been found in abandoned traps.

As marine animals die in the traps, they lose their ability to create offspring.

A single trap found in 2004 in Corpus Christi Bay contained nine sheepshead, seven Gulf toadfish, six gray snapper, four black drum and three Atlantic spadefish.

And while that trap came out of Corpus Christi Bay, the biggest source of the abandoned traps has been Galveston Bay. Through last year, 42 percent of all the abandoned crab traps found in Texas came from there, according to state figures.

The number of traps collected each year has declined since the program was created by a state law that was passed in 2002.

That year, 8,070 traps were collected. That number had fallen to 1,922 by 2006, the last year for which numbers were available.

But as they worked underneath the Tiki Island causeway last week, loading more than 50 abandoned traps into state trucks, Parks and Wildlife technicians Brad Grimmett and Brian Witt said the numbers have continued to drop. They said the law required that the traps they were hauling off be destroyed.