
Diver Mawen Ong gets to work on a tangled mess.
Underwater photographs by Yvette Lee
WRITER Lorin Hancock says it succinctly in her article on the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) website (worldwildlife.org), entitled Our oceans are haunted by ghost nets: Why that’s scary and what we can do: “Ghost nets aren’t supernatural, but they are legitimately scary.”
A ghost net is basically a fishing net that’s been discarded, lost, or abandoned in the sea. Maybe it was genuinely lost, or maybe it got caught on something, and it was too much trouble to retrieve, along with tons of other fishing gear left in the water—all of which endanger marine life.
“Just because a net is no longer used by fishers doesn’t mean it stops working,” Hancock writes. “These nets continue to trap everything in their path, presenting a major problem for the health of our oceans and marine life.”

The author rolls up some nets.
How does this happen? Ghost nets trap fish, entangle sea turtles, sharks, dolphins, and other untargeted species. In the case of large nets, you are talking about hundreds of thousands of animals, as these heavy, expansive nets can drag along most anything in their wake. In the meantime, they also break and suffocate corals. Plus, because most nets are made of nylon and plastic compounds, they ultimately add to the already alarming amounts of plastic in the ocean. In 2015, Hancock reports, a WWF-led mission in the Baltic Sea collected 268 tons of nets, ropes, and other material.
Scuba-divers in the Philippines get to see this ugly sight up close many times
Scuba-divers in the Philippines get to see this ugly sight up close many times, spoiling an otherwise beautiful and healthy reef, and proving time and again the constant assault of unsustainable human activities. (See the haunting images by Yvette Lee for this story.) “Ghost nets are dangerous to the reef because the suffocate all marine life that they cover,” says Penn De Los Santos, dive instructor and underwater photographer, ocean advocate, and, with his partner Marivic Maramot, the mavericks behind the Batangas Dive Association or BaDAss. “Corals would not be able to feed when they can’t open up their polyps, and any fish trapped in nets would eventually die.”

BaDAss’ Penn de los Santos presents a map of Calapan’s dive sites.
Watch Marivic’s video of some of the ghost nets left in Calapan:
BaDass was one of the main partners of the Calapan City Government City Tourism Office and Calapan Fisheries at the launch last July 22 of Go Dive! in Calapan, the city’s bid to be a scuba-diving tourism destination alongside its more popular neighbor across the water, Puerto Galera. The launch was officially held at Mahalta Resort and Convention Center, and several business owners joined in.
Last March, during Calapan’s foundation day, Mayor Marilou Flores Murillo, through BaDAss, invited underwater photographers to come and visit possible dive sites and take photos. “It’s about time Calapan’s name was included in our tourist destinations,” she says, as the city pursues accreditation from the Philippine Commission on Sports Scuba Diving PCSSD of the Department of Tourism.

Businessman Mel Agudo and Calapan Mayor Marilou Flores Murillo
‘Corals would not be able to feed when they can’t open up their polyps, and any fish trapped in nets would eventually die’
Maramot had recorded the ghost nets in Calapan’s dive sites and organized retrieval dives. When she sent the call out for people to help in the clean-up, our gang of divers, led by underwater photographer Yvette Lee, jumped in.

Dive gang: Mawen Ong, Melody Robato, BaDass’ Marivic Maramot, Yvette Lee, the author, Christine Enrile Chua
Ghost nets are big, ugly, tangled messes that can cut your fingers, and weigh much more than they look. Thus, armed with dive gloves and sturdy shears, about 20+ divers hopped on the comfortable boat graciously lent by businessman Mel Agudo, who owns businesses in Calapan as well as the established Marco Vincent resort in Puerto Galera, and headed out to Bako, Chico Island or Pulong Maliit for two clean-up dives.
At about 25m, we admittedly kicked up a storm trying to untangle the nets, because it could be more destructive to yank them out. Thus, some of us would patiently snip, tug, and then roll the culprits up. One of my groupmates, David, managed to unearth a used sack that served as a great receptacle for bits and pieces.
The best part was that, even as we furiously worked, we would be distracted by huge schools of triggerfish and other sea life, including an adorable juvenile sweetlips grouper darting in and out of the corals. It’s almost as if you could hear the animals (yes, corals are animals) breathing easy again—and yes, the reefs were certainly colorful and beautiful.
I was surprised to see a crinoid, a hand-sized, flower-like marine animal, stretching its arms out from inside my rolled-up bundle
Heeding Penn’s warning to be aware of the life caught up in the nets, I was surprised to see a crinoid, a hand-sized, flower-like marine animal, stretching its arms out from inside my rolled-up bundle. My buddy Christine and I snipped gently around the creature until it was able to float away in freedom.
During the program launch that evening, local government officials expressed their enthusiasm at pushing Calapan’s possibilities forward. Penn gave a presentation on the area being in the vicinity of the famed Verde Island Passage, declared by Smithsonian scientist Kent Carpenter as the global “center of the center of marine shorefish biodiversity” in a 2005 study. Mindoro, as part of the Philippine archipelago, also sits at the center of the Coral Triangle, a marine biodiversity center composed of this country along with Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Timor-Leste. Penn presented at least 14 viable dive spots in the vicinity of Calapan.
We were feted to local seafood feasts by Mel Agudo, whose vision for a more progressive province is backed by his proactive investments in the province. More than anything, however, we were glad to have hauled several bags worth of ghost nets out of the water—just a small fraction of what must be out there in Philippine waters, but still a contribution to the effort.
Environmental organizations like WWF are pushing for more definitive measures, like fishing gear that can be traced to their owners so people who dump nets can be penalized, and even recycling incentives for nets. For now, it felt good to get into the warm water (despite the impending bad weather when we departed), and do our bit to keep the reefs free and alive.
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Against all odds, we continue to protect our happy place—Tubbataha