IT’S been some years since the minke whale washed up on a Shetland beach. The distressed mammal had been caught up in plastic at sea and came ashore at Scalloway Harbour. Pete Bevington remembers that day well.
He’s at his home in the village of Hillswick with his dog, Sedna, a Great Dane named after an Inuit sea goddess, and after brewing tea, he continues with his story and explains the perils of ghost fishing.
“The whale died on the beach in a big pile of rubbish,” he says, grimly, adding that he has a photograph of the creature.
The Ferret is in Shetland to investigate ghost fishing as part of our special series, Scotland’s Seas In Danger, which for the past year has spotlighted problems affecting our marine environment. Eerily named, ghost fishing is when abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear – such as nets, pots, rope, traps and lines – continues to catch marine life. It kills untold numbers each year including seals, seabirds, sharks – and whales.
Bevington has witnessed the horrors of ghost fishing for decades. A lean man with a scraggly beard, he runs a wildlife sanctuary here at Hillswick, north-west Shetland, where sick, injured and abandoned seals and otters are looked after until they can return to the wild.
It was established in 1987 by his late wife, Jan – known locally as “Selkiewife” – who passed away in November. Bevington has been saving the lives of sea animals here since 1995. Nearly 30 years on, he says that in his experience, more marine mammals than ever are getting entangled in plastic netting at sea.
“It’s horrendous. It’s become a big problem,” Bevington says.
In most cases, he claims little can be done as the vast majority of seals seen with netting or plastic around them are either in the sea or at the edge of the water. As soon as someone approaches them, he explains, they head towards the ocean.
“Regularly we hear about seals that have got something [plastic] around their neck – and it digs deeper and deeper and deeper [into the skin] and embeds itself,” he adds.
On one occasion, Bevington managed to creep up on a sleeping seal caught in plastic but most times, he’s been unable to catch them. Generally speaking, he says, they can’t be caught and helped until at “death’s door”, lying on a beach, when they haven’t got much time left, or are just plain exhausted.
He recalls there was one seal on the island of Noss, which was monitored by locals for six months until it finally came ashore. “It was really knackered and covered in netting which meant it could be caught,” says Bevington who is alarmed by plastic pollution.
Aside from trapping and killing wildlife, ghost fishing can also have dire consequences for the marine environment. According to Greenpeace, an estimated 640,000 tonnes of ghost gear enters the ocean every year, equivalent in weight to more than 50,000 double-decker buses. Wildlife pays a high premium for this plastic pollution which can also cause exhaustion, suffocation, starvation, and amputations.
Shetland fishers share Bevington’s concerns. They include Ryan Mouat, a bulky engineer on a whitefish trawler called the Alison Kay which lands its catch at Lerwick Harbour. He has graphic photographic evidence revealing the impact of ghost fishing which he sends to me via WhatsApp – huge piles of green nets full of fish, crabs and starfish, piles of discarded nets being lifted by cranes, dead seals on beaches entangled in ropes, a decapitated seal, trapped sea birds.
Mouat has thousands of photos, some of which he has sent to Greenpeace.
A major problem, Mouat says, is the use of gillnets and longlines by foreign trawlers, mostly French and Spanish. A gillnet is a single wall of netting anchored on the seabed to catch fish that swim into it. Longline fishing is a method that uses a line with baited hooks to catch fish. Worn-out gillnets and longlines should be returned to port for disposal but Mouat claims some boats discard them at sea instead of bringing them ashore.
“It’s huge volumes of gear that we pull up off the seabed with our trawl gear,” he says.
Gillnets – typically made of monofilament (nylon) – have been banned from some waters because of their high rates of bycatch. In Scotland, they are prohibited within six miles of the coast but beyond 12 miles, foreign vessels that use them are not monitored, according to Mouat, who describes gillnetting as a “destructive and intensive form of fisheries”.
He says that Shetland fishermen have watched foreign vessels land at Lerwick and not bring ashore any waste. They should have discarded gillnets and long lines to put into skips, he argues, adding: “We’ve discussed this with Marine Scotland until we’re blue in the face and they’re adamant it’s a sustainable form of fishery.”
MOUAT’S claims are backed by the Shetland Fishermen’s Association. Its spokesperson, Daniel Lawson, says that although gillnetting is a legitimate fishing method, the “scale and intensity of non-UK gillnetters” operating around Shetland has caused problems for years.
“Traditional fishing grounds are blocked, gillnet gear is dumped and becomes an entanglement risk – both to wildlife and other vessels – and there are several well-documented incidents of these boats attempting to foul the local fleet,” he adds.
In response, the Scottish Government says that any form of dumping is “completely unacceptable” and that gillnetters must comply with all rules and regulations when fishing. Landings into all Scottish ports, including foreign vessels consigning catches back to the continent, are “inspected and monitored on a risk-based basis”, a spokesperson tells the Ferret, adding that anyone with intelligence on “suspicious activities” by vessels can report information via the Government’s website.
There are likely national rivalries at play here post-Brexit between Scots fishing boats and their foreign counterparts, but regardless of the politics, ghost fishing is a veritable blight that has impacted Shetland for many years.
According to Robina Barton (above), executive secretary at Kommunernes Internationale Miljøorganisation (KIMO), an international organisation that works with Shetland Islands Council to tackle marine litter, 83 tonnes have been collected since 2005.
This year alone, nearly seven tonnes have been collected in Shetland, and across Scotland while 2500 tonnes have been disposed of since 2005.
KIMO’s project is called Fishing for Litter and Barton explains it works closely with the fishing industry.
Participating boats are given large bags to collect litter that’s caught in their nets while fishing, which they bring back to port, to be collected and disposed of free of charge.
The initiative started in Shetland in 2005 and next year marks its 25th anniversary. The scheme is expanding. There are now 71 harbours in the UK involved including 36 in Scotland. Barton, based in Lerwick, says KIMO works with the fishing industry rather than telling them what to do. “Ultimately it benefits everyone if the sea is clean,” she adds.
Shetland has also welcomed external help to deal with ghost fishing. Last year, the charity Ghost Fishing UK visited for the second time to clear debris from the seabed. The trip followed reports of lost gear and net, and a team of 12 scuba divers spent five and a half days diving in depths up to 30 metres.
Rope and bits of net were sent to the mainland to be recycled, and any usable fishing pots recovered were returned to fishers.
“We were collecting mainly lobster pots, which local fishermen had lost,” says Fred Nunn, one of Ghost Fishing UK’s divers. He explains that once pots are lost they don’t stop catching sea life. Creatures enter pots for habitat but can’t come out. “They die and become bait – so the next creature comes in for a free meal then dies, and the vicious cycle continues,” Nunn says.
There’s a coordinated approach within Shetland to tackle marine litter, and Fishing for Litter has proven to be a success story, but ghost fishing will continue to kill and maim sea life because of the vast amounts of plastic going into our seas.
Last week, The Ferret revealed that scientists had found the highest-ever level of microplastics in Scottish waters this year. Microplastics are tiny plastic litter measuring less than five millimetres but they come from larger pieces of plastic which have broken down over time, such as fishing gear – and there is growing concern globally over the serious consequences for wildlife and human health.
For its part, KIMO would like to see “every fisher in every harbour” bringing in marine litter, and more resources to tackle disposal in an environmentally friendly way through recycling to avoid landfill.
Back at Hillswick, Pete Bevington echoes the concerns raised by Mouat and rails at the use of gillnets.
“They (European fishing boats) discard by chucking stuff over the sides, and local boats are hauling them up. Local boats don’t use these nets, yet now we’re seeing more seals than ever with netting around them,” he tells me.
We finish our cups of tea and – accompanied by Sedna the Great Dane – Bevington takes us to meet three seals in his care at Hillswick. They include Smudge who was rescued recently. Bevington, along with volunteers Brian and Lindsay, are trying to teach Smudge to eat fish otherwise he won’t survive back in the wild. It’s a risky procedure involving Bevington prising open Smudge’s mouth and putting fish inside until he swallows it. Smudge doesn’t know how to eat fish and Bevington worries that his difficulties could be the result of plastic pollution.
“What we have witnessed over the last 35 years is that the seals coming in are coming in smaller,” he says. “They’re coming in weaker, and they’re coming in less resilient, so they are more prone to infection. They’re harder to keep alive. We’re tube-feeding them for longer until they are able to take fish. They are taking longer to learn to eat independently.”
Bevington has had grey seals with behavioural problems. This is a new phenomenon, he adds, possibly linked to ghost fishing and plastic pollution – something he would like to see scientists investigating. He often has intense relationships with seals which means these changes have been noted over time.
“It’s real, we see it every year,” he says. “The only thing I can think of is heavy metals and PCBs going up the food chain. These heavy metals and PCBs adhere to plastic and if they’re being ingested [by sea life] through microplastics. It’s all very connected.”
At time of writing, Smudge is still alive but Bevington posted on Hillswick’s website to say that three pups rescued from Orkney recently had died. They weren’t caught up in plastic like the minke whale found at Scalloway beach – but undoubtedly ghost fishing will continue to haunt Shetland.
