MARK MANUEL, OPERATIONS MANAGER, NOAA FISHERIES CORAL REEF ECOSYSTEM DIVERSION:

The net that we found was first located in September 2013. The sheer volume of it is pretty astounding.  All in all, it took about four whole days of cutting and prepping and towing to get this single net, which weighed approximately  11.5 from the reef back to Honolulu for recycling processes.

The focus of our survey and removal efforts is to mitigate the threats that these nets and or other derelict fishing gear have  towards our endangered Hawaiian monk seals  and as well our threatened green sea turtles here. 

And essentially these shallow coral reef environments  just act as a entrapment for these nets and  plastics that are just flowing through the ocean.   The video you see you have in one case two free divers methodically swinging a cargo net under a portion of this large monster net that we found and helping to prepare it for transport back to our NOAA ship.   From a global perspective, it may be a small net but in a capacity of the Hawaiian Islands and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands with pristine coral reefs  and uninhabited islands in the thoughts it’s a pristine ecosystem that these nets can essentially compromise and both destroy reefs as well as potentially killing other mobile wildlife.

The pile of  debris on the back of that NOAA ship and basically that is the fruits of our labor—that’s the 57 tons of primarily nets and plastics that we removed over the twenty-one operational days. By the time we get to it it's essentially too late if you think about it. It needs to start with education outreach and getting stories like this out to the public and to fishermen and to know that, you know, hey, you could be thousands and thousands of miles away and it may not be your home but you may be impacting someone else’s home and their livelihood.