USA: Thousands of forgotten locust traps to be removed

Two decades after Connecticut's lobster industry collapsed, federal funding has been approved to begin removing hundreds of thousands of locust traps that remain at the bottom of the Long Island Strait, a “ghost fishing zone” that continues to capture and kill marine life to this day.

The $569,000 included in the new federal budget will fund a coalition, led by the Norwalk Maritime Aquarium, which will oversee the removal of the traps. The objective is to hire local fishing vessels and fishermen to collect some 3,000 traps over two years and thus dispose of abandoned fishing equipment that has disrupted the food chain of the strait and become a source of pollution.

“These are not traps that continue to be actively recovered by fishermen. And yet, what we've learned over years of research is that they're still traps that actively capture different types of marine life,” said Jason Patlis, president and CEO of the aquarium. “There aren't many locusts, but there are crustaceans that are ending up in the traps. There are fish that get caught in the traps.”

The plan to remove old locust traps from Connecticut waters is similar to that undertaken in the New York waters of the Long Island Strait. Since 2011, the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Suffolk County has removed 19,000 abandoned traps, with 91 per cent of them still operating. Live crabs, fish and lobsters, including pregnant females, were found in about one-third of those traps, often attracted to other animals that had died within the trap, said Scott-Curatolo-Wagemann, senior professor at the agency.

An estimated one million locust traps remain in the Long Island Strait, whether they were accidentally lost over the years or abandoned after the local industry collapsed in 1999, prompted in part by a massive locust death, Curatolo-Wagemann said.