- The tuna industry commonly uses fish aggregating devices (FADs) to efficiently collect large volumes of fish; when these devices are lost or abandoned, they can harm marine wildlife and habitats.
- In Ecuador, lost FADs can drift into the Galápagos Marine Reserve, a protected area with hundreds of endemic and threatened species, where they pollute the environment with plastic, harm reefs and entangle wildlife.
- Local agencies and organizations are developing ways to prevent FADs from entering the marine reserve in the first place and trying to clean up the mess they make when they do get in.
SANTA CRUZ, GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS, Ecuador — “Good morning,” Walter Borbor, a social media-famous fisher, says to his followers in a 2022 Instagram video. “What we have here is a plantado.” He points to a large black floating device with a trailing rope that’s wrapped around the tail of a decomposing whale — right in the middle of the Galápagos Marine Reserve.
Plantado is the local name for a fish aggregating device (FAD), a tool industrial tuna fleets commonly deploy to attract numerous tuna they can scoop up all at once. Modern drifting FADs have been used since the 1980s to improve fishing efficiency. Over the past 25 years, they’ve become the primary tuna fishing method, according to a May study in the journal Science. Meanwhile, Ecuador’s tuna fleet grew by roughly half over the same period. Both factors have contributed to more and more abandoned FADs drifting into the Galapagos Marine Reserve from international fleets, sources told Mongabay.
Abandoned FADs pose numerous problems. They shed plastic as they break down, damage coral reefs and collide with artisanal fishing boats. Inti Keith, a researcher with the Charles Darwin Foundation, a Galápagos-based science and conservation group, said scientists routinely find sharks, turtles, sea lions, seabirds and other wildlife entangled in the netting — or worse, dead. Now, Galápagos agencies and organizations are banding together to better track and collect these devices.
But the root of the issue — their deployment outside the marine reserve — remains a challenge.
A wide-scale problem
FADs are made up of a floating platform with netting underneath and a satellite buoy to locate it. These platforms create habitat for baitfish that then attract larger predators such as tuna, which also congregate around FADs for shelter and navigational reference points on the open ocean. The latest FADs also carry a sonar device that detects the volume of fish underneath. When the volume is high, it notifies the fishing vessel, which then comes to scoop up the fish in a large net called a purse seine.
Currently, 275 purse-seiners representing 11 countries are registered with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), the regional fishery management organization for the eastern Pacific Ocean. Those that fish with FADs can deploy dozens to hundreds of the devices at a time. The IATTC does not limit the number of FADs vessels deploy, but it does limit the number of buoys actively transmitting FAD locations, to 340 per vessel. This amounts to tens of thousands of deployments annually in the eastern Pacific alone, with Ecuador as a top contributor, according to recent reports from the IATTC and Pew Charitable Trusts, a U.S. think tank.
“This modality of fishing … is not going to stop,” said Leonardo García, quality control manager for the Isabela Technical Unit at Galápagos National Park.
FADs are abandoned or lost for a few reasons. Because the platforms are cumbersome and cheap, it’s often easier for fishing vessels to let them drift away after they collect their catch, keeping only the costlier satellite buoy. Sometimes, the satellite buoy’s battery dies, making it impossible to locate. FADs can also drift so far that vessels don’t bother retrieving them. Occasionally, a vessel will come across a different fleet’s FAD, collect its catch and turn off the satellite buoy so its owner can’t locate it.
As of July, the national park reported that 277 FADs had been reported in the Galápagos Marine Reserve since 2017, most of them during coastal cleanup projects. The actual number of FADs that pass through the reserve is undoubtedly much higher, park staff told Mongabay in an interview. There is no single data-collection effort for FAD sightings in Ecuador or the Galápagos Islands, making them difficult to reliably track.
This isn’t just a Galápagos issue, García said — it’s global. One way to address it is through regional efforts, he said. The national park hopes to cooperate with an intergovernmental collaboration among Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Panama called the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor to tackle the derelict FAD problem on a wider scale.
Ecuador’s Vice Ministry of Aquaculture and Fisheries did not respond to Mongabay’s attempts to schedule an interview.
Management and monitoring lack teeth
Before plantados became common, the harms of abandoned devices were little known, Alberto Andrade, director of the local conservation group Frente Insular, told Mongabay. Andrade, who spent 20 years as a fisherman before switching to nonprofit communications, said that as his group engaged in coastal cleanup efforts, members came across pig heads and cow intestines attached to FADs as bait, as well as sea turtles and marine mammals that were caught in the netting. Frente Insular began a media campaign about the impact of FADs, and attitudes among fishers and community members began to change.
“It doesn’t seem fair to [the local community] that these large industrial fleets can approach the limits of the marine reserve and remove the tuna, which is the target fish,” Andrade said. “But we know that in the sea, it’s not only tuna that live. Sharks, manta rays, dolphins, turtles and all these are called ‘bycatch.’”
A nonprofit called TUNACONS, which represents mainly Ecuadorian industrial tuna-fishing companies in their sustainability efforts, is taking steps to address the problem.
“Our goal is to close the loop: to design better, recover more and recycle or reuse as much as possible,” TUNACONS director Guillermo Morán Velásquez told Mongabay.
In 2022, TUNACONS launched a FAD retrieval program in collaboration with the national park that pays artisanal fishers roughly $400-$600 per collection to cover operational costs and fuel. In the past three years, Morán Velásquez said it has collected roughly 60 FADs. TUNACONS dismantles the platforms and gives the material to local waste-management authorities for proper disposal or recycling, he added. If buoys are in good condition, TUNACONS returns them to the vessel owners for reuse.
But 60 is just a fraction of the thousands of derelict FADs on the open ocean. Furthermore, TUNACONS retrieves FADs primarily from the fleets it represents, leaving others adrift. Sometimes people outside the program collect only the buoys and leave the platforms and other material at sea, but the program’s objective is to collect the entire device, Morán Velásquez said.
These shortcomings make the model unsustainable, Andrade argued, because it leaves too many platforms and associated netting at sea as “ghost gear” that continues to shed plastic and endanger wildlife. “That idea of plantado recovery is just a greenwash,” he said.
Some nonprofits have suggested banning FADs entirely not only because of the waste issue but also because they can lead to unsustainable bycatch and overfishing of juvenile tuna. However, a scientific paper argues that improving management would be a better alternative.
“The problem is not the use of the FAD per se — it’s gear that improves the efficiency of fishing,” Morán Velásquez said in an email. For instance, FADs reduce ships’ fuel consumption per ton, he said. “The problem arises when there is poor management at the end of their life cycle: Some devices drift and can wash up on beaches or in sensitive areas, becoming marine debris.”
A solution TUNACONS pushes instead are its EcoFADs: biodegradable FADs made from natural materials that are designed to be safer for wildlife.
Biodegradable FADs are a step in the right direction, but they can still contain nondegradable parts, such as plastic, synthetic nets, flotation devices, ropes and buoys, said Dana Zambrano, a former undersecretary for fisheries resources in Ecuador.
For the national park, which occasionally retrieves FADs reported by tourist operators or its staff during routine patrols, cleanup is both expensive and logistically challenging, said Jenifer Suárez, the national park’s marine heritage management officer. It can cost $1,000 per retrieval to pay for a boat, captain, gas, diving equipment and other gear necessary to remove the large platforms from tricky areas, such as when they are wedged in coral reefs.
Satellite buoys are important targets for cleanup efforts, Suárez added. Each buoy carries a number corresponding to its mother vessel so the IATTC can identify the ships that lose them, and so vessels can keep track of their buoys. But this system doesn’t extend to the FAD platforms themselves, so if a FAD gets separated from its buoy, there’s no tracing its ownership. Moreover, the IATTC doesn’t currently use the system to hold ships accountable for lost FADs, and it does not disclose its data on FADs either. A representative of the IATTC did not respond to written questions from Mongabay.
For now, Galápagos National Park is using ownership information from the FADs it finds to help develop a management plan for FAD debris. It could eventually be useful if the park can come up with a system to make owners pay when their FADs pollute the marine reserve.
“The challenge is how to make the industry … aware that there’s a responsibility to recover, or not to leave, as often happens, these objects drifting around,” the national park’s García said.
Working toward solutions
Beyond cleaning up FAD garbage, the national park is working with the British charity Galápagos Conservation Trust, Charles Darwin Foundation, TUNACONS and other organizations to identify upstream solutions.
“What we are trying to look for is a way to find out how to prevent these [FADs] from entering the reserve,” Suárez said.
The Galápagos Islands sit at the center of four converging ocean currents: the Humboldt Current from the south, the Panama Current from the north, the South Equatorial Current from the east and the Cromwell Current from the west. Keith, the Charles Darwin Foundation marine biologist, is part of a team working to map these ocean currents and simulate FADs’ movements on them, accounting for wind patterns, time of year, water temperature and other parameters. The goal is to predict where FADs could drift depending on where they originate outside the reserve. This could enable entities such as Galápagos National Park and the IATTC to develop preventative regulations; for instance, to avoid deployment in areas where currents are likely to carry FADs through the reserve, Keith said.
For its part, the IATTC has for the past decade convened a FAD working group to discuss other solutions: encouraging countries to fund retrieval and tracking efforts, creating financial incentives for fleets to deploy fewer FADs and switching to less harmful FADs. For example, under new rules, IATTC members and complying countries must use non-entangling FAD designs as of 2025, partially biodegradable designs starting in 2026 and fully biodegradable FADs by 2029. Last May, the group also discussed [pdf] establishing a formal FAD register, which would assign unique IDs not only to satellite buoys, but also to FADs themselves, making them easier to monitor. The Indian Ocean Tuna Commission is the only regional fisheries management organization piloting a FAD register so far.
For these measures to be effective, however, there needs to be strong and persistent monitoring, former undersecretary Zambrano told Mongabay. “It should be mandatory (by national regulation) to share the signal and location of the buoys that each FAD carries,” she wrote in a text message.
Despite the challenges, the issue seems to be gaining momentum. In February, the IATTC, the Pacific Community regional development organization and several other organizations will hold an international workshop in French Polynesia on mitigating abandoned FADs in the Pacific Ocean.
Banner image: A loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) swimming around a FAD off the northern Galapagos Islands in 2009. Image © Alex Hofford / Greenpeace.
Mongabay staff reporter Max Radwin helped translate and conduct the interview with Alberto Andrade. TUNACONS provided a simultaneous translator, Belén Montesinos, for the interview with Guillermo Morán Velásquez. Travel and in-person reporting for this story was supported by The Safina Center.
Clarification 3/2/26: We have amended this story to clarify Dana Zambrano’s statement about biodegradable FADs and one of Guillermo Morán Velásquez’s statements about the TUNACONS FAD retrieval program.
Tuna fishing devices drift through a third of oceans, harming corals, coasts: Study
Citations:
Pons, M., Kaplan, D., Moreno, G., Escalle, L., Abascal, F., Hall, M., … Hilborn, R. (2023). Benefits, concerns, and solutions of fishing for tunas with drifting fish aggregation devices. Fish and Fisheries, 24(6), 979-1002. doi:10.1111/faf.12780
Schiller, L., D’Costa, N. G., & Worm, B. (2025). The global footprint of drifting fish aggregating devices. Science Advances, 11(19). doi:10.1126/sciadv.ads2902
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