PORT O’CONNOR — The sun was shining when Allan Berger and his wife, Brigid Berger, scanned the shorelines of Espiritu Santo Bay for deserted crab traps Monday morning.
A low tide helped expose a trap stuck in the mud, several hundred feet in front of their boat.
Inside the wire mesh was not only a dead stone crab but also a 14-15 inch speckled trout that appeared to have been killed inside the trap by freezing temperatures that plagued Texas last week.
“The trap itself is baiting,” Brigid Berger said. “As the crabs and fish die, they attract more.”
Berger removed plastic from the trap and stomped it flat on the front of the boat to be recycled while her husband, the chair of the San Antonio Bay Partnership, recorded the trap’s contents, location and owner’s information in a data collection application.
Then off they went to pick up another trap on the first day of the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife Department’s Crab Trap Removal Program.
The cleanup was scheduled to start last Friday, but severe winter weather led the state parks and wildlife department to ask volunteers to wait until Monday before removing any traps from open water.
During the annual initiative, crabbing is closed for 10 days, and any traps left in waters are considered litter under state law.
“Waiting to remove these traps will allow crabbers the opportunity to collect traps that they may not have been able to pick up earlier in the week due to the recent winter weather conditions,” Robin Riechers, director of TPWD coastal fisheries division, said in a news release about the delay.
Abandoned crab traps have been identified as a significant source of mortality for organisms that get trapped in them. The process is known as ghost fishing. The traps also can damage shrimping nets, snag fishing lines, create visual pollution and get caught in boat propellers.
One of the traps that the Bergers picked up Monday, for instance, appeared to have been hit by a boat. Several harbored dead crabs.
Since 2002, volunteers have removed more than 38,000 abandoned crab traps from Texas coastal waters through the state program. The San Antonio Bay Partnership has organized and mobilized volunteers to pick thousands of those traps in local waters.
This year, the partnership is expanding its focus area to include San Antonio, Aransas, Lavaca and Matagorda bays. About ¼ of volunteers who signed up for the cleanup had to back out when scheduling was delayed by the weather, Berger said, so he is still in need of volunteers with boats.
Berger hopes volunteers will find fewer traps than they did in previous years because he and other local leaders, including Texas Sea Grant Agent RJ Shelly, have been working to educate commercial crabbers about the issues surrounding abandoned crab traps. The efforts are funded by a grant from the NOAA Marine Debris Program.
“We applied for the grant after four years of picking up traps and feeling like we were not getting anywhere, so we thought we should try something different,” Berger said.
At about $20 a trap, crabbers usually retrieve their cages, but sometimes storms or strong winds can move them into unknown locations or one crabber could be responsible for leaving behind several dozen in one area. Increasingly sophisticated technology has allowed organizers to tell which crabbers have left significant amounts behind.
Ahead of this year’s cleanup, Berger reached out to crabbers and mailed them flyers reminding them to pick up traps ahead of the removal, he said. Shelly also met with some of the crabbers who owned a lot of the traps picked up last year in an effort to address the issue.
“My assumption has always been that the crabber doesn’t want to loose his traps,” Berger said. “Whether he gets behind because of weather and can’t pick them all up or he misses some or has a boat breakdown — with all of the things he has to deal with, you can understand why some get left behind.
“There are some things you can do to protect against that. If one crabber has a problem, I’d rather help him pick up his traps than pick up abandoned traps, but I have to have a relationship with him to do that.”
February 23, 2021 at 11:32PM
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Volunteers take to bays to pick up abandoned crab traps - Victoria Advocate
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