2nd International Fishing Gear Innovation Summit 2025
Canada hosted the 2nd International Fishing Gear Innovation Summit on February 25 to 26, 2025 in Moncton, New Brunswick. Listen to what global partners, stakeholders and experts had to say about innovative tools and practices to address abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear (ghost gear), and to address the threat of whale entanglements.
Transcript:
It’s an opportunity for Canada to demonstrate what a global leader we are.
There are lots of solutions.
It’s better for everyone to work together.
Having events like this are critical, to continuing to connect and strengthen our community across the country.
Coming to this conference, was so excited.
I think some people think of ghost gear. It’s just some nets that are floating at the surface. But that’s not the case.
Ghost gear is a more important problem than people think, I think it’s very very important because you don’t see it, It’s there all year, and it can do damage at any time.
Crab pots, gillnets if, if you lose stuff and it continues to fish, well, that’ll only rot. And then more fish will get in it. And like, you know, the cycle keep on going all the time.
If you have a buoy at the surface and a buoy line going down to a pot, well, if that buoy gets cut off or torn off in a storm, the trap is still there and the rope is still there, but it’s down on the bottom. And these whales feed very, very close to the bottom.
The concept behind whale safe gear is that it’s a way of fishing that won’t cause harm or an entanglement to a whale. Different types of whale safe gear try to remove that rope so that the whales don’t actually encounter the lines.
This is a prime example of how materials that are recovered from ocean, shoreline, and marine industrial cleanup including rope and net, and different aspects of ghost gear. And then we clean it, size reduce it, pelletize it, and once it’s in pellet form, we can use that in new manufacturing processes so we can make anything from growing towers to buckets gardening tools.
The shoes and the fabric are made of gillnets, combining gillnets with thread. collecting the gillnets and, you know, empowering young people to go around the shores, pick up gillnets.
It’s very good to see that there is so much going on a global stage when it comes to ghost fishing.
It’s a difficult conservation problem, but it’s not one that’s just being pushed aside. It’s one that is being dealt with through meetings like this.
It’s not about pointing fingers. This is about everyone trying to collectively solve the same problem. We all might have different ways of doing that, but at the end of the day, we’re all working together. To do the same thing.
There is a way to change and innovate and make sure it’s more sustainable. I think we’ll be able to get there. I’m very optimistic to see what happens in the next 5 years.
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