November 9, 2018 — Ocean activists seem to be on the eve of winning a long battle against a controversial type of fishing gear that has been banned in most of world’s oceans. But many fishermen are not ready to let go of what has been a reliable method for catching valuable swordfish.
A federal court ruling last week could lead to strict limits on using drift gillnets in California, one of the last places where the gear is still allowed. Drift gillnets are used to snag swordfish but prone to ensnaring other sea life, too. The court decision comes weeks after the state’s governor signed a law that would phase the nets out of use over the next few years.
Todd Steiner, an environmentalist who has fought for stricter regulations on drift gillnets since the 1990s, believes the time has come to ban them everywhere.
“Drift gillnets should no longer be in the ocean,” says Steiner, founder of the Turtle Island Restoration Network based in Forest Knolls, Calif. “Only one in six or seven animals caught in these nets is a swordfish. They’re indiscriminate in what they catch.”
Drift gillnets are essentially long curtains of nearly invisible mesh that hang from buoys and entangle large creatures that swim into them. The nets are notorious for catching high volumes of unwanted creatures, or bycatch — the primary reason Steiner and other activists want them banned.
But Santa Barbara fisherman Gary Burke, who has been using drift gillnets since the 1980s, says environmentalists who oppose the gear have set unrealistic expectations. “We’ve reduced our bycatch so much at this point that it would take some dramatic tech innovation to reduce it anymore,” he says.