Ghost Gear

Ghost gear — lost or abandoned fishing equipment that continues to catch and kill marine life — is one of the most persistent forms of ocean pollution.

The Scale

An estimated 10–30% of crab and lobster pots are lost every season. Causes include:

• Storm damage: Heavy weather drags pots, tangles lines, snaps buoy connections
• Prop cuts: Boat propellers sever buoy lines
• Current drag: Strong currents move pots beyond their line reach, submerging buoys
• Gear conflicts: Overlapping pot strings tangle with each other
• Vandalism/theft: Buoy lines cut intentionally

Once the buoy is gone, there’s no way to locate the pot on the bottom.

The Damage

A lost crab pot doesn’t stop working. The funneled entries continue to attract and trap crabs, finfish, and other organisms. Animals enter, can’t escape, die, and their decomposition attracts more animals. This cycle — called “ghost fishing” — continues for years until the pot eventually corrodes enough to collapse.

The numbers are staggering:

Region	Derelict Pots	Annual Kill
Chesapeake Bay	145,000 estimated	3.3 million blue crabs + 40 fish species
Gulf of Mexico	250,000 lost per year	Unknown — many don’t meet safety regulations
Salish Sea (BC/WA)	12,000 lost annually	~178,000 Dungeness crabs

A single Dungeness ghost net kills an estimated $20,000 worth of crab over 10 years. British Columbia’s crab fishery alone spends nearly $500,000 per year replacing lost gear.

Ghost gear also damages sensitive bottom habitat — seagrass beds, coral, rocky reef — as pots are dragged by current and storm action.

Prevention with SmartPot

SmartPot addresses ghost gear at every stage:

Detection

• The smart buoy logs GPS position with every telemetry packet
• Drift alerts trigger when a pot moves more than 50 meters from its deployment point
• The base station shows the last known position of every pot in the fleet

Location

• Even if the buoy is damaged or submerged, its last reported GPS position is stored on the base station
• Future: acoustic pinger on the submerged unit for diver-assisted recovery

Recovery

• Ropeless recovery means the pot can be commanded to surface without a buoy line
• If the buoy is damaged, the pot can still be located by its last GPS fix and recovered by dragging or diving

Failsafe

• The servo door defaults to unlocked on power loss
• If the buoy battery dies completely, the submerged unit loses power and the door opens
• Trapped animals can escape rather than dying in an unpowered pot

Tip

The failsafe door design is a deliberate engineering choice. A pot that can’t communicate is a pot that can’t be managed — and an unmanaged pot should not be trapping animals.