Ghost Net Revenge: Divers Remove Fishing Net Plaguing Reef for 16 years
Back in 2000, as a unit diving officer at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, I was always looking for spots to train my divers. This search took me all over Panama Bay — sometimes to places with absolutely no value in terms of dive training, but sometimes to great sites.
The author untangles an abandoned fishing net that he helped retrieve from the reef off Panama.
Ramon LePage
One of the good ones is near Otoque Island, about 27 miles southwest of Panama City, with great underwater topography. It was a healthy ecosystem and a perfect training site.
On my first exploration there, though, I found something I never wanted to find: A huge abandoned fishing net had come to rest on the seafloor, smothering a considerable portion of the rocky reef. Ghost nets are commercial fishing nets that have been abandoned at sea, either lost or deliberately discarded. Carried by currents or tides, they traverse the world’s oceans, snaring fish as they drift.
These nets do not discriminate, capturing endangered species (such as sea turtles), all manner of small fish and countless pieces of marine debris.
Throughout the 2000s, I continued to use Otoque Island for training, scientific collections and photographs. Time passed, things changed and I accepted a position with Conservation International. My work took me to projects all over the globe, but I always hoped to go back to Panama and get rid of that net.
The plan began with recruitment of a local nongovernmental organization and government agencies: Autoridad de los Recursos Acuaticos de Panama (ARAP), Ministerio de Ambiente (MiAmbiente) and Servicio Aeronaval de Panama (SENAN).
Last year, I traveled to Panama, met with our newly formed Ghost Net Removal Team and explained the plan. The team took a few exploratory dives, planned logistics and shared concerns. On our last dive, I cut off a little piece of the net and hung it on my whiteboard back at CI headquarters as a constant reminder of the plan.
The day came — September 9, 2016 — and a team of crew and divers, including me, set out to Otoque. As we sailed, a few whales breaching in the distance raised our hopes of success.
After gearing up, we jumped in, and there it was. Removing an immense, heavy net is not an easy task. You can’t just rip the whole thing out in one try or you’ll risk potentially doing more damage to the reefs. Also, you can’t just drag it away with a boat; the team had to use inflatable lift bags to elevate sections of the net off the reef.
It was arduous work: exploring and filming sections first; cutting and pulling sections of the net; adding air to the lift bag; and communicating with the other divers to avoid any of us being ensnared in the net itself.
Finally — nearly two decades after the net was discovered there — we managed to raise a portion of it to the surface. We repeated this same operation at least three more times before having to change our scuba tanks.
Flush with the success of our first dive, the second one went even more smoothly, and we worked to remove nearly the entire net. In the end, we extracted 90 percent of the massive net.
After we boarded our boats from our final dive, one of the SENAN divers said, “For the next mission, we need a support boat and more divers.” I was elated — having seen the destruction that this net caused, they were eager to find and remove them entirely.
We aim to monitor the comeback of marine life on this rocky reef, and as more ghost-net-removal efforts gain support from the environmental ministry and other partners, I hope Panama can lead the way in ridding the ocean of these destructive threats.