Ghost nets, a scourge of seas, threaten the marine ecosystem. Abandoned by fishermen, long stretches of ghost nets are being cleared by Serço Ekşiyan, an Istanbul native and amateur diver. Ekşiyan, 68, has been a passionate diver since his youth. He started picking ghost nets from the bottom of the sea some 16 years ago and since then has cleaned up some 29,700 square meters (35,500 square yards) of the nets with the help of two friends.
Over the years, Ekşiyan found new uses for the ghost nets. Some are converted into shopping bags while others are sent to villages in the eastern province of Erzincan where they are used as "plant covers" for protecting crops against weather conditions.
Ekşiyan, who was born in Tarabya, a neighborhood on the shores of the Bosporus, says he has been a diving enthusiast since his first scuba diving experience at the age of 19. "The bottom of the sea was like an aquarium then. It was thriving with fish, vivid and colorful," he recounts. Lately, pollution has taken hold, he says. "We lost that aquarium because of pollutants and overfishing," he laments.
When he started coming across an increasing number of nets tangled in underwater rocks, he decided to do something about it. He asked his friends, Ercan Akpolat and Volkan Narcı, for assistance to clean up the nets. "I dive first and shoot footage of the area. We watch it and make our plans on the cleaning work, how many cans we will we need, how big the nets are, etc.," he told Anadolu Agency (AA) Tuesday. The team uses plastic cans to bring the nets to the surface, pumping air into the cans they attached to the nets.
Ekşiyan says "net pollution" is a big problem for the seas, pointing out that some 640,000 tons of nets and other fishing materials are discarded into seas across the world according to the United Nations figures.
The divers prioritize conversion of pieces of nets into shopping bags and proceeds from the sale of those bags are delivered to a marine conservation society. The rest are cleaned and sent to villages in Erzincan where they are used to cover tomato, pepper and strawberry plantations.
Though the exact figures are not available, it is estimated that 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) of nets are lost or left by fishing boats every year. Nets made of plastic derivatives also contribute to plastic pollution at sea. In 2020 alone, authorities removed ghost nets from 10 locations across an area of 10,000 square meters. In 2019, the government mandated that all commercial fishing boat operators must inform the authorities of the type, quantity and coordinates of the nets lost at sea. Experts warn that they are a primary threat for ecosystem as they render the spots they are dumped at or stuck uninhabitable for the fish and other marine creatures.