Traps ; Traps are portable devices made of wire or wooden 

 slats that are deployed on the bottom. The traps are attached by 

 lines to surface floats that mark the presence of a trap. This 

 type of gear is used principally to fish for lobster and crab. 



New England Lobster Fishery ; Lobster traps, 

 constructed of wood or plastic-coated wire, plastic or 

 aluminum, are deployed in depths from 120 feet off 

 Maine to New Jersey to depths of 1,900 feet off Cape 

 Hatteras. In inshore areas, traps are set singly or 

 strung in groups along a single line. Traps are left 

 for one to five days inshore and five to ten days 

 offshore. In 1980, 2.4 million traps were used inshore 

 and 25,000 traps offshore. There are anecdotal 

 accounts of leatherbacks becoming entangled in lobster 

 gear, but the frequency of entanglement has not been 

 documented (O'Hara et al. 1986, p. 14-17). 



A report exists of a loggerhead caught in a crab trap line 

 in Delaware (O'Hara et al. 1986, p. 49). Also damage done 

 by loggerhead turtles to lobster traps in Florida has been 

 reported (Grouse 1984, p. 3). 



Trawls ; A trawl is a large bag-shaped net towed behind a 

 fishing vessel (Figure 7) . Leaving aside for the moment otter 

 trawls utilized in the shrimp fishery (Figure 8) , trawls used in 

 the winter flounder fishery off Cape Hatteras have been 

 implicated in the mortality of loggerhead and Kemp's ridley sea 

 turtles leaving the Chesapeake Bay (Crouse 1984, p. 3). The non- 

 selective design of this gear makes it a candidate for incidental 

 capture of turtles in areas of turtle concentration. 



The Southeastern U.S. Shrimp Trawl Fisheries 



The shrimp trawl fishery conducted in inshore and offshore 

 coastal waters from North Carolina to Texas is the United States' 

 most valuable fishery at $470 million in 1984. While catch has 

 remained more or less the same for many years, the number of 

 participants has increased dramatically as fishing gear and boats 

 have become cheaper and economic opportunities in other areas 

 have decreased. Now up to 40,000 small boats and vessels deploy 

 tens of thousands of shrimp trawls in inshore and offshore 

 waters . 



The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has 

 estimated that this fishery incidentally captures 47,973 sea 

 turtles each year of which an estimated 11,179 drown (see Table 

 III) . These estimates are based upon rates of capture in about 

 27,000 hours of observation on shrimp trawlers (Henwood and 

 Stuntz 1986) . 



In 1978, NMFS began a research program to develop 

 modifications to shrimp trawls that would substantially reduce 



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