ISLAND OBSERVER: TONY AMOS
Checking out marine debris in Hawaii

Tony Amos is a research fellow at The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institutte in Port Aransas.

I'm on the 10th floor of the 37-floor Hilton Waikiki Prince Kuhio Hotel looking out at Diamond Head on one side and long lines of fairly big surf on a brilliant blue Pacific Ocean on the other. (Looking up from the ground floor to the top of this hotel, I cannot imagine what the proposed building of similar height will look like on Mustang Island. Here it fits in with all the other tall towers of Waikiki).

I'm here as part of my work on a Na- tional Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Committee on Marine Debris. Although the results of our work will not be released until they're published later this year, our first session was a public session where invited experts told the committee about certain aspects of fishing practices in the Pacific Ocean that contribute to the man- made debris in the sea: derelict fishing gear.

In particular, we heard about the growing use of FADs in the tuna fishing industry. FADs are Fish Attracting Devices. It has long been known that tuna congregate underneath natural floating objects like trees or even smaller objects like coconuts. After the practice of targeting pods of dolphin that school with tuna was outlawed (hence Dolphin-Safe- Tuna). The purse seiners started fishing on floating natural objects with some success but soon started deploying FADs made from bamboo frames tied together and buoyed with floats or plastic pails. Pieces of webbing (netting) were hung from the frames that attracted even more fish. Since then FADS have become much more sophisticated, with GPS devices attached that can be remotely tracked from the trawlers and even sonar devices that look down and tell how many and what type of fish are congregating beneath the FAD. Now, to deter other fishing boats from stealing the FADS or simply fishing off someone else's FAD, they use sub-surface floats and all that can be seen on the surface is a small difficult-to-spot buoy with a radio mast. The transmitter and receivers are all coded so that only the owner knows how to interrogate and locate them. Literally thousands of FADs are out there in the Pacific (and I now realize I have probably found one or two washed up on our South Texas beaches). This has become the main way tuna is fished these days, they say.

We also learned of a group of companies here in Oahu that collect old trawl and other netting and fishing line by the ton from remote beaches in the Papahanaumokuakea National Sanctuary (the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands). Mountains of plastic webbing, line and rope are cut up, fed into huge furnaces to be combusted and converted to energy.