Conservationists and northern prawn fishermen want a dedicated body appointed to clean up destructive 'ghost nets' in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Listen Duration: 4 minutes 19 seconds 4 m 19 s Listen Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. A unique industry partnership designed to tackle the issue of ghost nets is asking government to support its clean-up efforts ( Hailey Renault ) Download 7.9 MB

Prawn fishermen operating off Queensland's north coast voluntarily remove abandoned fishing nets from their fishery as part of a partnership with World Animal Protection (WAP).

However, both organisations agree the fishing industry is not equipped to manage the clean up effort on its own.

Members of the Northern Prawn Fishery Industry (NPF) collected three large nets during the Gulf's 2015 banana and tiger prawn season.

NPF project officer Adrianne Laird said the work saved the lives of turtles, fish and other marine life.

"They were monofilament gill nets, roughly about 30 metres with a drop of 10 metres, and they were all brought in to the port of Karumba," she said.

"They're called ghost nets because they're ghost fishing: they're floating around catching everything and killing a lot of sea life up there.

"I think any removal of nets is significant, even getting one out of the ocean plays a very important role."

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Ms Laird said large ghost nets could weigh hundreds of kilograms, and in some instances were too heavy for fishing vessels to pull aboard.

When this happened, fishermen had no choice but to leave the nets in the water and hope they washed up on the coast in an area where land and sea rangers could retrieve them.

"We're asking them to attach buoys to [the net] to try and keep it afloat and then they give us a position," Mr Laird said.

"For all the nets they have retrieved they give us the position of where they found them, and we report that to World Animal Protection for them to gather that information.

"They can weigh tonnes, so they can't all be retrieved."

WAP's head of campaigns, Nicola Beynon, said in the past, responsibility for cleaning up the nets was passed back and forth between State and Commonwealth organisations, depending on where the net drifted.

She said the northern prawn industry was doing a great job collecting the nets, but said it did not have the resources to do the whole job.

"We have been asking the Government to dedicate one central agency responsible for surveilling for ghost nets, particularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and then responding to reports of abandoned nets at sea and being responsible for recovering them," she said.

"At the moment its not clear if the nets are in State or Commonwealth waters, is it the Department of Environment's job, is it the fishery department's job or is it the Navy's responsibility.

"We want one agency clearly identified and given the resources to make it their mission to surveil and recover ghost nets from the ocean."

Ms Beynon said WAP was part of an expert team advising the Federal Government on priorities for its marine debris threat abatement plan, which was reviewed last year.

She said the organisation would continue working with the Government and lobbying for the creation of a dedicated body to manage ghost net collection in the Gulf of Carpentaria.