A coalition of environmental groups is celebrating a milestone in its multi-year project to remove abandoned or lost lobster traps in the Long Island Sound.
The traps are in the Sound because the fishing industry either lost them or abandoned them after the lobster population collapsed in the late 1990s.
Experts said warming waters, potentially pesticide pollution and shellfish disease created the “perfect storm” in 1999 to cause a mass die-off of lobster in the Sound and they have never recovered.
Since 2022, at least 4,000 abandoned traps have been removed from Connecticut waters by The Lobster Trap Recovery and Assessment Partnership (L-TRAP).
The coalition includes The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk, the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County, Save the Sound, Project Oceanology, Remote Ecologist, and commercial lobstermen from Connecticut and New York.
On the New York side of the sound, roughly 22,000 traps have been recovered since 2010.
“We still estimate that there's tens of thousands of traps in the water,” said Justin Susarchick, a senior researcher at the Maritime Aquarium.
He said they all pose a risk to marine life.
Ensnared on the sea floor
““The insidious thing is when animals get captured in the traps and die, it invites other animals to come into the trap,” Susarchick said.
Of the traps removed from Connecticut waters, Susarchick said “90% of them have at least one animal inside.”
A total of 86,000 living and dead marine animals were found in the recovered traps representing 86 different species.
According to Susarchick, it was predominantly whelk snails but it also included fish like tautog, black sea bass, cod and scup as well as oysters and even a few lobsters.
Collaborating on the clean-up
Now the commercial fishing industry is helping clean up the lobster trap problem.
“We are working hand-in-hand with members of the commercial fishing industry,” Susarchick said to find the traps on the bottom of the Sound.
“They bring us to areas, a person they knew worked the waters in an area or that might be a dumping ground for old gear,” Susarchick said.
Then the recovery team throws a rope in the water containing several grapple hooks at the end, and the boat trawls the waters hoping it snags a trap.
This summer the project started using side-scan sonar technology, a Humminbird XPLORE 12, to create a detailed image of the seafloor and find more abandoned traps.
Recovered traps meet their fate
The recovery teams can often determine who once owned the traps because legally registered ones will still have their yearly permits attached.
Susarchick said they try to contact each owner and see if they want the trap back, but he said in the overwhelming number of cases, they do not.
Then the lobster trap is tossed in a crusher.
“After a 30-day hold, we squish those traps down, and we partner with a local recycler to sustainably break them down and permanently take them out of the system,” Susarchick said.
The project is paid for through the Long Island Sound Futures Fund and its grant runs till November 2029.
L-TRAP is scheduled to complete 235 recovery trips across all of Long Island Sound in 2027.
“It’s an ambitious year,” Susarchick said. "We're hoping that it will really accelerate the trap recovery.”
