For many years the crab pots which had been abandoned were lying under the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and were still able to attract crabs even though the fishers who had owned them were long since disappeared. To someone who was only looking at the scene they might have appeared to be no more than forgotten rubbish.
What if the traps that had gone missing were simply being used to draw money out of the pockets of working watermen?
In 2008 Virginia started paying fishermen to retrieve the crab pots that had been lost in the Chesapeake Bay, and as a result there was a six-year campaign to clean things up which achieved more than simply getting the abandoned fishing gear out of the water. When the programme had come to an end in 2014, the researchers estimated that the removal of thousands of abandoned crab pots had resulted in an extra $21.3 million being added to the value of the blue crab harvest, as per Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
How could it be that removing old traps from the Bay would result in such a big economic return?The answer lies in what those abandoned pots continued to do long after they were lost.
