Abandoned Crab Trap Removal Program.mp3

Art Morris [] The 2001 legislature passed a law that allowed us the opportunity to create an abandoned crab trap removal program.

Art Morris [] And the problem was that there's no salvage laws in Texas. You can't just go out and pick a abandoned crab trap and remove it from the bay. It's somebody's property.

Art Morris [] Game wardens would go out and remove them for illegal fishing, but, you know, to spend that much time and effort removing these crab traps was just too much. And largely, it was being done on the middle Texas coast - San Antonio Bay and such.

Art Morris [] But, so, they would have little volunteer kind of groups get together once a year to remove crab traps, but there had to a be a game warden there, and say we could remove this because it didn't have, you know, a float or tags or whatever.

Art Morris [] So they, they worked on that for a couple of years.

Art Morris [] And then, one of the guys that they took with them came up with a bright idea that, you know, maybe we should just get a law made where we can do this with volunteers.

Art Morris [] And anyway, the law got passed and Parks and Wildlife created an abandoned crab trap removal program. It was to occur on the third Friday of each February, and last for ten days. During that ten-day period, any crab trap left in the water was considered abandoned and could be removed.

Art Morris [] Okay, well, so the problem with that is you got active crabbers that are fishing. This is their livelihood. So, so we had a little bit of a learning curve there, and a little bit of, you know, pushback from the crabbing industry.

Art Morris [] But it was during in February, not a time of year that caught a lot of crabs, and they soon bought into it. A few lazy crabbers didn't remove their traps, or they put them out in a pile in the bay somewhere. That didn't pass muster. So, they were still in the bay. They were still fair game. So we removed some that, you know, were active traps, but they weren't properly removed, so.

Art Morris [] But anyway the program started in 2002. And man, it was a big hit. We had crab removal stations on every bay system on the coast. I'm going to say we had roughly 16 or so, spread up and down the coast.

Art Morris [] People got involved. Coastal Conservation Association, Boy Scouts, friends of whatever bay, all kinds of organizations got together and came out. Barbecues the day of the clean-up to feed the volunteers and people'd go out.

Art Morris [] And, I think that first year, we removed 3020 traps - way over our expectations. And I forget how many volunteers we had - 600 or something like that, and that's with 400 boats, you know.

Art Morris [] And today, they've removed over 40,000 traps on the Texas coast and the program is still going strong.

Art Morris [] And one of the benefits of that program is not only are we removing unsightly trash in the bay, these abandoned crab traps ghost-fish. They attract fish into them, and crabs. The crabs die, can't get out, and die. And so they create bait. So there's a continuing fishability of these traps that goes on and on and on.

Art Morris [] And we went around and looked at several of these traps to see what what was in them, what they were catching in them. And I think we had about 30 species of fish and invertebrates, and vertebrates even, like diamondback terrapins and a variety of game fish - we had reds, trouts, flounder. There was at least two otters - one skull and one dead animal found in them. All kinds of stuff: pretty much what you find in the bay, would get caught in those things.

Art Morris [] We extrapolated what crab traps killed over the course of one year and the numbers were astronomical.

Art Morris [] So removing these traps not only served a kind of a trash removal program, but also served as a conservation effort to reduce this ghost-fishing, this waste of these other important species.

Art Morris [] So we were happy about that. I ran that program for 14 years until I retired. That's one of the things I was proud of being involved in. So.