Calling all fishermen!

The setting for our first meeting at Net Your Problem, a fishing
gear recycler in New Bedford. Those nets are an example of the
very fishing gear we're trying to keep off of shipwrecks.

Friends, it is a busy week for me! My marine debris project is ramping up as we take on one of our major activities for the year: stakeholder engagement. Yes, that is a fancy term for "talking to fishermen." 

Fishermen are experts on the marine environment. They spend more days at sea than any scientist - usually by at least a factor of 10. I have only spent a few days on fishing boats in my life, and each one was an incredible learning experience. Fishermen know things - just by being on the water so often, they amass a level of oceanographic knowledge that would take several years to match in a classroom. My team wants to know why fishing nets get entangled on shipwrecks and how we could prevent entanglements in the future. To answer those questions, we are going straight to the source: fishermen themselves. 

Calling all fishermen: we have cookies!

Our aim is to reach a wide swath of fisheries across the state, so we are going to where fishermen usually are: port cities. This week, we're holding discussions in New Bedford, Provincetown, and Chatham. Later this month, we'll be in Woods Hole, Gloucester, and back in New Bedford. 

So far, we've held two meetings, and they've both gone well. I was surprised by how easily some of our participants opened up and how readily they shared their experiences. My collaborator, Laura, brought marine charts to both meetings, and she ended up handing one fishing captain a pen to mark locations where he had encountered "hangs" and lost nets. He was eager to show us. 

Members of the marine debris project team with our hosts 
at Net Your Problem in New Bedford.

Our team has brainstormed a number of solutions that we believe could help reduce the number of times a fisherman loses a net to a shipwreck. Because we work in academia rather than the fishing industry, we can't accurately estimate the effectiveness of each of our ideas. Every new policy lives or dies based on community support (read: compliance), so we have to ask for input from the fishermen who would be affected by our solutions first. So far, two solutions seem to have pretty strong support from the community: making an open-source data layer of "hang" spots that fishermen could download into their navigation systems, and making marine debris dumpsters available in key port cities around the state. 

The project I am in charge of is just one of several across Massachusetts and the US addressing the challenge of marine debris. We are definitely building momentum in Massachusetts, and I look forward to seeing how our project will develop!