New study reveals ‘staggering’ scale of lost fishing gear drifting in Earth’s oceans

Enough commercial fishing line is left in the ocean each year to stretch to the moon and back, according to the most comprehensive study ever completed of lost fishing equipment.

The staggering amounts of lost gear, which includes 25 million pots and traps and 14 billion hooks, was likely having deadly consequences for marine life, one of the study's authors said.

Enough nets were lost or discarded each year to cover Scotland. If all types of lost line was tied together, it would be able to stretch round the Earth 18 times.

"This is super confronting," said Dr Denise Hardesty, of the Australian government's CSIRO science agency, and one of the study's authors.

"This is having an unimaginable toll of unknown deaths that could result in population level effects for marine wildlife."

Published in the journal Science Advances, researchers from CSIRO and the University of Tasmania used standardised interviews with 451 commercial fishers in seven countries to ask what was being lost.

Researchers matched those interviews with data on the amount of commercial fishing globally to estimate what was lost. Annual losses included: