The Ghost Trap Crisis Haunting America's Fisheries — and the Program Fighting Back
Somewhere along the seafloor off Midcoast Maine, a lobster trap sits in darkness. It has no owner. No one is coming to haul it. Its buoy line snapped in a storm season ago, and the wire cage has long since settled into the silt. But it is not idle. It keeps catching. Lobsters crawl in, drawn by the residual scent of bait. Crabs follow. Fish that prey on crustaceans slip in after them. None get out. The trap continues this cycle — catching, killing, accumulating — month after month, with no one above water aware of any of it. Multiply that scenario by tens of thousands, spread it across every major fishery from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal California, and you begin to understand the scale of what marine scientists call the ghost trap problem.
It is one of the most insidious and underreported forms of ocean pollution in the United States, and it is costing commercial fishermen real money while quietly devastating the ecosystems that sustain their livelihoods. Now, a federally backed initiative rooted in nearly two decades of hands-on research is delivering the most ambitious and coordinated response this country has ever mounted against the problem.
What the Numbers Actually Mean
In just two years, the Nationwide Fishing Trap, Removal, Assessment and Prevention (TRAP) Program has recovered more than 14,000 derelict fishing traps weighing almost 600,000 pounds, supported more than 135 jobs and documented nearly 36,000 animals caught in "ghost traps" in 15 U.S. states and Freely Associated States. Those are not abstract environmental statistics. Each one of those 36,000 animals represents a direct economic loss to someone making a living on the water — a blue crab that never made it to a Maryland seafood house, a spiny lobster that should have turned up in a Florida Keys restaurant, a stone crab claw that a fisherman worked long hours to legally harvest and never got the chance to sell.
The weight figure — nearly 600,000 pounds of recovered gear — puts the physical scale of the problem in terms any fisherman or outdoorsman can grasp. That is roughly the equivalent of three hundred compact cars' worth of wire, rope, and barnacle-encrusted metal pulled up from American waterways in a two-year window. And the program is only getting started.
Through the program's third round of funding, William & Mary's VIMS & Batten School is building on that impact by announcing 11 new projects across seven states. The latest round of competitive subawards will provide approximately $1.24 million for projects in Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana and California that are expected to remove another 15,450 traps while creating and sustaining 128 jobs.
How Ghost Traps Work — and Why They Are So Destructive
The Mechanics of an Invisible Problem
Derelict gear refers to fishing equipment that has been lost, abandoned, or otherwise discarded in the water, commonly due to storms and boat traffic. All derelict fishing gear is defined as any lost or discarded gear that is no longer under the control of a commercial or recreational fisher, and can include lines, nets, pots, traps, floats, and other equipment. The trap design that makes a crab pot or lobster cage so effective commercially is precisely what makes it so damaging when it goes rogue: the funnel entrance that guides animals inside does not work in reverse. Once in, they cannot escape.
Derelict fishing gear can continue functioning long after it is lost or abandoned. These "ghost traps" capture both commercially valuable species and bycatch, damage sensitive habitats, pose navigational hazards and compete with actively fished gear. That last point is one fishermen feel most acutely. When a working crabber sets his pots in an area thick with ghost gear, his catch rates suffer in direct proportion. He is not competing with other fishermen — he is competing with abandoned equipment from seasons past.
Derelict traps can also trap and kill non-target species, such as fish, turtles, and other endangered and threatened species that are not meant to be caught. Ghost gear can be especially harmful to vulnerable wildlife, such as endangered and protected species, including turtles and marine mammals. In practical terms, that means a regulatory burden for fishermen as well — bycatch mortality in derelict gear can count against industry quotas and trigger federal oversight that hurts the whole fleet.
The Economic Damage Is Real and Quantifiable
As part of a study funded by the NOAA Marine Debris Program, a team of researchers found that 3.3 million blue crabs are killed in derelict crab pots in the Chesapeake Bay, as well as more than 40 species of fish that are not the target of the traps. Three point three million blue crabs. In a fishery where watermen work brutal hours for modest margins, that level of unrealized harvest is catastrophic. And the Chesapeake is just one body of water.
A 2016 report found that removing just 10% of derelict crab pots and lobster traps could result in an additional $831 million in global landings annually. That single data point reframes the ghost trap issue entirely. This is not a niche environmental concern — it is a massive drag on the seafood supply chain, affecting processors, distributors, restaurant buyers, and ultimately consumers who pay more for crab and lobster because the available supply is being quietly strangled.
When derelict gear breaks down — crab pots and lobster traps, primarily — they release toxins into the water, putting coastal and marine environments as well as fishing industries in harm's way. The degradation process adds yet another layer of damage: older traps, particularly those with galvanized or coated wire, leach metals as they corrode across seasons on the seafloor.
The Roots of the TRAP Program: Virginia Did It First
The national TRAP Program did not emerge from a policy document drafted in Washington. It grew out of on-the-water experience in the Chesapeake Bay, where researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science spent nearly two decades developing, testing, and refining what works.
Beginning in 2008, VIMS partnered with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission and local watermen on a large-scale Chesapeake Bay removal program that ultimately recovered more than 34,000 derelict crab pots. That partnership between scientists and working fishermen became the template — a model that proved it was possible to get meaningful removal done at scale without turning it into a bureaucratic exercise. The watermen who knew the bay best were the ones pulling the traps.
Research following those efforts estimated that removing derelict traps in Virginia and Maryland increased blue crab harvests by 38 million pounds over six years, resulting in an estimated $33.5 million in additional harvest value for watermen. That figure is the clearest possible argument for the program: derelict trap removal is not charity for the environment at the expense of industry. It is an investment that pays working watermen back in real dollars.
The TRAP program is the brainchild of Drs. Kirk Havens, Donna Bilkovic, and Andrew Scheld, and builds on VIMS' success in leading a multi-year partnership with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission and Virginian watermen to remove more than 34,000 derelict crab pots from the Chesapeake Bay. Scientists in this Virginia Marine Debris Removal Program also pioneered methods to assess the economic and ecologic impacts of the derelict pots and the benefits of their removal. Their methodologies — for counting, weighing, mapping, and cataloguing recovered gear and its bycatch — are now being standardized across the national program so that data from Maine lobster grounds and Florida Keys reefs can be meaningfully compared and analyzed.
As the Batten School & VIMS put it, the institution is "uniquely positioned to lead these efforts thanks to our nearly two decades of experience tackling this issue in the Chesapeake Bay."
Federal Backing and the Architecture of the Program
Where the Money Comes From
In 2023, the Batten School & VIMS was the recipient of an $8 million, four-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Marine Debris Program to administer the National TRAP Program. The funding for removal projects stems from NOAA's Marine Debris Program through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That bipartisan origin matters — it means the program has survived changes in political leadership and demonstrates that protecting working waterways has cross-aisle appeal when the economic argument is made clearly.
In addition to distributing approximately $1.5 million annually to fund regional cleanup efforts, the program has established a standardized national database to evaluate the environmental and economic benefits of the removal efforts and to inform future policies. The database piece is arguably as important as the physical removal work. Without consistent, comparable data, it is impossible to build the kind of policy case that drives sustained federal investment.
A Competitive Grant Model That Leverages Local Knowledge
Supported by a 2023 award from NOAA's Marine Debris Program and administered by the Center for Coastal Resources Management (CCRM) at VIMS & the Batten School, the TRAP Program takes a comprehensive approach to combating derelict fishing gear by combining removal efforts with support for coastal economies, nationwide data collection and research to inform long-term prevention efforts.
The grant structure is deliberate. Rather than running federally directed crews out of Washington, the program funds local and regional organizations that already have relationships with fishermen, knowledge of the seafloor, and the operational capacity to work in conditions that outside contractors never could. It is the kind of governance model that actually produces results in messy, real-world marine environments.
Round one of subawards, announced in December 2024, sent funding to projects spanning an enormous geographic footprint. From diving in waters up to 130 feet deep to retrieve lobster and crab traps in protected ecosystems to the removal of debris in tribal fishing grounds, the initial round of projects facilitated removal efforts in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, New York, Washington and the Freely Associated State of Palau.
Round two, announced in October 2025, expanded the reach further. That year, $1.8 million in grant funding was distributed across 13 projects in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Maryland, South Carolina, Florida, Washington and California. Recipients anticipated the removal of over 8,000 ghost traps and the creation of 195 jobs, mostly for commercial fishers.
The Third Round: Deeper Reach, Higher Ambitions
Now comes round three — the most recent announcement — and the numbers reflect a program that has built real momentum. William & Mary's VIMS & Batten School has announced 11 new TRAP Program projects across seven states, targeting the removal of more than 15,000 additional ghost traps while generating jobs and expanding a national dataset on derelict fishing gear impacts.
The geographic scope of the third round is instructive. Maine and Massachusetts bring the established lobster fishery dynamic — dense trap-setting activity over rocky New England seafloor, where lost gear accumulates in complex underwater topography. Maryland puts money back into the Chesapeake, the program's original proving ground. North Carolina addresses gear loss in the mid-Atlantic zone where storm frequency is high and traps go missing regularly. Florida targets the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, where spiny lobster and stone crab traps become ghost gear in one of the most ecologically sensitive marine environments in the Western Hemisphere. Louisiana rounds out the Gulf Coast, where shrimp and crab fisheries operate in murky, high-sediment waters that make locating derelict gear particularly challenging. California's inclusion brings the Pacific dimension — a state with significant dungeness crab and spiny lobster fisheries where gear loss off rocky, wave-battered coastlines is a persistent issue.
On-the-Ground Project Details
The individual project designs within the third round reveal the range of techniques required to address derelict gear across such varied environments. OceansWide received $135,751 to locate, characterize, and remove abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear in Midcoast Maine. They will focus on large aggregations of lobster traps known colloquially as "gear balls," using a specialized grapple that will be fabricated for the project. OceansWide will work with lobster fishermen to locate high-priority gear balls that pose the biggest risk to fishing and navigation in the Midcoast Maine region.
The "gear ball" problem in Maine is particularly worth understanding. When a trap line's surface buoy is severed — by a passing vessel's propeller, a severe storm, or simple degradation — the remaining traps on that line can cluster together on the seafloor, tangled into dense masses that can snag actively fished gear, damage bottom habitat, and represent a significant navigational hazard for any vessel dragging gear through the area. These aggregations are not easily broken up by hand and require purpose-built equipment — exactly the kind of specialized solution a competitive grant program can fund.
The City of Beverly, Massachusetts received $124,700 to support the removal of derelict lobster traps from Beverly Harbor using SCUBA-based recovery methods. Operations will be led by the Beverly Harbormaster Department in partnership with a coalition of regional stakeholders, including commercial fishermen, environmental organizations, and local dive professionals.
The National Marine Sanctuary Foundation was awarded $146,553 to remove derelict spiny lobster and stone crab traps from the coastal waterways of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Working in a sanctuary context adds regulatory complexity — every removal must be planned to avoid disturbing sensitive coral habitats — but it also makes the work more urgent, since the Florida Keys ecosystem is among the most threatened reef environments in North America.
The Virginia Watermen and a Bonus Discovery
One of the most unexpected developments from the broader TRAP Program came from Virginia, where the ongoing work revealed an entirely unforeseen benefit of cleanup operations. In Virginia, commercial watermen who are removing derelict crab traps have simultaneously collected millions of bathymetric data points while operating their vessels in shallow areas of the Chesapeake Bay that are difficult and expensive to map through traditional surveys. This information, collected at little to no additional cost, is being provided to NOAA and the International Hydrographic Organization and will support coastal managers, mariners, and federal agencies working to improve how coastal waters are understood, represented, and leveraged.
That kind of secondary data yield — high-resolution depth mapping of shallow, commercially active waters collected essentially as a byproduct of a removal operation — is exactly the kind of multi-use efficiency that makes a federal program genuinely defensible in an era of budget scrutiny. The watermen are cleaning the bay and charting it at the same time.
The Science Behind the Policy: The Innovation Lab
William & Mary's Batten School and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are partnering with the University of Georgia to establish a Derelict Trap Policy Innovation Lab, bringing together researchers and students. Through the work of the Innovation Lab, the project will use the collected data to assess potential solutions to the ecological and socioeconomic impacts of lost gear nationwide.
This is where the TRAP Program separates itself from a simple cleanup campaign. The data from recipient projects will be analyzed by the Policy Innovation Lab — a partnership between the Batten School & VIMS and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia — to explore drivers of derelict trap abundance, bycatch, and other ecological or economic variables. This information will help inform state and federal policy recommendations to improve derelict trap prevention and mitigation.
Prevention is the end game. Removal operations are necessary and produce immediate benefit, but the goal of every good environmental program should be to eventually make itself less necessary. Understanding why traps are lost in the first place — whether the cause is storm frequency in a given region, particular gear configurations, depth, substrate type, vessel traffic patterns, or the economics of the fishery that make retrieval cost-prohibitive — creates the foundation for regulatory changes, gear design improvements, and insurance or incentive structures that reduce the rate of loss upstream.
The National Dashboard
A first-of-its-kind national online dashboard is being developed to standardize data collection. Previously, current efforts to address derelict fishing gear were disconnected, making it difficult for organizations to access funds for removals and coordinate the tracking, monitoring, and assessment of these efforts in a manner that provides consistency in data collection and analysis. The dashboard closes that gap — it is a connective tissue for what was previously a patchwork of regional efforts operating without any common framework.
The Voice from the Water
Federal program administrators can cite numbers all day. What animates this issue is the perspective of the men actually working these fisheries. NOAA's Marine Debris Program director put the scope of the effort plainly: "Through the TRAP Program, we've seen people working in remote areas and sometimes deep underwater to remove legacy debris, partnering with fishermen to identify gear hotspots, and conducting at-sea removals in areas that are important to coastal communities," said Jason Philibotte, Director of NOAA's Marine Debris Program.
The phrase "legacy debris" is significant. It acknowledges that much of what is being pulled up now was not lost recently — some of it has been cycling on the seafloor for years or even decades, representing the accumulated negligence of storm seasons long past and the failure of previous generations of policy to address the problem at scale. The TRAP Program is, in part, cleaning up its predecessors' messes.
The sentiment from working watermen reflects the same urgency. "It's a reoccurring problem here, and we really have to stay on top of it," Peter Clark, founder and president of Tampa Bay Watch, said. "You've got to give back to what you're taking from. Without the water being clean, I don't have a business or a fishery to work with," said Bobby McGuire, a professional angler who charters a fishing boat. Those are not the words of an environmental activist — they are the calculations of a businessman who understands that his entire livelihood depends on ecosystem health.
Historical Parallels and the Long View
The ghost trap problem is not new, and American fishermen have understood it intuitively for generations. What has changed is the scale of commercial fishing pressure and the durability of modern gear. Wire mesh traps last far longer on the seafloor than the wooden pots of previous decades, meaning that lost gear today accumulates and continues ghosting for much longer before it degrades to the point of inactivity.
Between 2008 and 2015, the U.S. Fishing for Energy initiative collected 2.8 million pounds of fishing gear, and in partnership with Reworld turned this into enough electricity to power 182 homes for one year by incineration. That earlier initiative demonstrated that recovered gear need not simply go to a landfill — it has material value and can be redirected into energy or recycled into other products. The TRAP Program's removal work creates a similar opportunity to think creatively about what happens to the 600,000 pounds of material already pulled up, and the tens of thousands of pounds to come.
Internationally, the scale of the problem offers sobering context. Over 12 million tons of plastic debris enter the oceans every year, and abandoned fishing gear accounts for a full 10% of that pollution. American commercial fishing contributes to that global total, and American-led removal programs like the TRAP initiative represent the kind of domestic action that gives the U.S. standing to press for international ghost gear agreements and standards.
What This Means for the Future of American Coastal Fishing
The trajectory of the TRAP Program over three funding rounds tells a clear story: a concept proven at the state level in Virginia, scaled nationally with federal investment, is now producing results that would have seemed ambitious on paper just three years ago. Fourteen thousand traps recovered. Nearly 36,000 animals documented as ghost trap bycatch. A hundred and thirty-five jobs supported in coastal communities that do not have many options outside the fishing industry. And a third round about to push those numbers significantly higher.
The newest phase targets the removal of more than 15,000 additional ghost traps while generating jobs and expanding a national dataset on derelict fishing gear impacts — which means the program will more than double its total trap recovery count when this round concludes.
These efforts continue to employ local fishermen to target hotspot areas of derelict traps in the Virginia portion of the Chesapeake Bay, providing valuable information on the rate of trap accumulation in active blue crab fishery areas and the economic and ecological impacts of the discarded gear. That model — use the people who know the water best to do the work, pay them for it, and extract scientific data in the process — is transferable to every American coastal fishery the program touches.
For the men who fish these waters, the TRAP Program represents something concrete in a policy landscape that often feels distant from the realities of running a boat. It puts money in their pockets twice: once through the jobs it creates during removal operations, and again through the improved harvest yields that follow when the ghost gear competition is cleared from their grounds. That is a rare alignment of environmental and economic interest, and the program's administrators have been careful to build it into the program's DNA from the beginning. The Chesapeake Bay proved the math works. The rest of the American coastline is next.
