Thousands of Eel Traps in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch | The Ocean Cleanup

We get asked all the time what these are because we find so many of them in our extractions. And because it's such a distinctive item. We call them eel traps, they're actually used to catch an animal called the hagfish, which is not the most beautiful animal in the sea, but it plays an important role in the ecosystem like everything else. These traps are used on the west coast of the US and in Asia, and the way it works is, it's two pieces, you put some food in here, I guess, for the hagfish, and this piece goes on the end and then the fish is attracted to this and goes in and then can't escape because of the shape of this piece. And then they pull them out. These are used for food, it's a delicacy in Korea, and then also for their skin, it's called eel skin, and it's used for clothing and fashion accessories and stuff like that. And we just find absolutely thousands of these. We've decided to make kind of a point of this I guess, to show just how many we get, so we have six bags here, from the last two extractions that we made on trip two, just to show the quantity of it. Well I guess one of the biggest open questions still is why we find so many of these compared to these, Because it's two pieces of the same trap right, they go together. And yet we find we find literally thousands of these, and many many times fewer of these, and the only thing I can guess is that once this has an eel inside it, this is removed onboard the fishing vessel, this bit is kept, and this bit is just thrown away.

Channel: The Ocean Cleanup

Views: 922,218

Keywords: The Ocean Cleanup, technology, boyan, boyan slat, plastic, pollution, innovation, environment, ocean, river, great pacific garbage patch, climate change, ocean cleanup, ocean cleanup interceptor, interceptor jakarta, interceptor plastic, the ocean cleanup interceptor, ocean pollution, plastic pollution, boyan slat ocean cleanup, climate change news, the interceptor, boyan slat interview, ocean cleanup interceptor malaysia, the ocean cleanup how it works

Id: S427rkGGHv4

Length: 2min 11sec (131 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021