Pop-up crab traps aim to save Central Coast’s struggling fisheries and its threatened whale population

This spring, while the Dungeness crab fishery was closed along the California coast to prevent whale entanglements, fisherman Stephen Melz made a third of his annual income pulling up traps filled with the purple and red crustaceans.  

Melz, a 40-year industry veteran who fishes out of Half Moon Bay, was one of around a dozen participants throughout the state able to legally fish for Dungeness crab as part of a trial program using pop-up gear, also known as “ropeless” or “on-demand.” 

Between April and June, Melz made around $145,000 from spring crab fishing, a season that has been dramatically shortened or completely closed to all commercial fishers for the past nine years. “That pays some bills,” he joked. “We will absolutely keep using them in the spring.” 

Like traditional crab traps, Melz’s large, circular nets — called pots — rest on the sea floor. But instead of being connected to a buoy on the surface by a long rope for hours or days, the fishing line and buoy are stored within the trap. When the fisher is ready to retrieve it, they signal the trap to release the rope and buoy and it pops up to the surface, where it can be hauled in from the side of the boat.

The pop-up traps represent a potential solution to a decadelong crisis that has had an enormous economic impact on the local Dungeness crab industry. As whale activity along the coast has increased, so has the animals’ contact with fishers. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has responded by shortening the crab season on both ends in an effort to keep fishing lines out of the water. Meanwhile, conservationists and crabbers have struggled to find a solution that protects both sea life and fishers’ livelihoods. 

After four years of testing and a “wildly successful” trial this past spring, according to Oceana, the supporting nonprofit, the pop-up traps will be available to all commercial crabbers for the first time starting next year for the spring fishing season. The testing was led by gear manufacturers Sub Sea Sonics, Guardian Ropeless Systems and Sustainable Seas Technology. 

The technology offers hope for economic revival in fishing industries on the Central Coast hit hard by years of restrictions on Dungeness crab season because of whale entanglements, while also promising to protect marine life and bring more local seafood to Santa Cruz County plates.

“If you can fish in a whale-safe way, it really is a win-win for everybody,” said Geoff Shester, Oceana’s California campaign director and senior scientist.

The Dungeness crab fishery, which stretches from Morro Bay to the Oregon border – and beyond into Washington – is one of the most important fisheries in Santa Cruz County, and throughout the state. But since 2016, the season has been halved from eight months stretching from November through June to four months in January through April because of increased danger to whales and other sea life. 

In Monterey Bay, Dungeness crab historically made up a large chunk of many fishers’ annual income. The crabs fetched their highest price at the start of the season in November and into December, when customers purchased crabs for their holiday tables. Delays over the past nine years have pushed the opener into January, and the loss of the vital crab market has been a blow to many area fishers. 

The delays stem from a growing environmental challenge. Whales migrating along the West Coast of the United States can become tangled in the lines of conventional crab gear. Over the past six years, sea life entanglements have increased dramatically. Between 2000 and 2013, 10 whales became entangled in gear every year on average. That started climbing in 2016. By 2024, it had shot up to 36 whale entanglements along the West Coast, according to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Entanglements can kill whales, and attempting to disentangle a fishing line from a whale can be extremely dangerous for both the animal and scientists. 

For the past 10 years, finding a whale-safe solution for Dungeness crab fishers has been a priority for both the crabbing industry and environmental groups. After four years of trials by commercial fishers under experimental fishing permits, pop-up traps have taken the lead as a solution.

Cutting-edge 40-year-old technology

At first, the idea of pop-up traps seemed like “science fiction,” said Oceana’s Shester. The international ocean conservation advocacy organization has been working collaboratively since 2015 to create the traps with a collection of scientists, fishers and conservationists known as the California Dungeness Crab Fishing Gear Working Group and gear manufacturers Sub Sea Sonics, Guardian Ropeless Systems and Sustainable Seas Technology.

But the retrieval technology is actually about 40 years old. It was originally developed and used by deep-sea scientists and the U.S. government to retrieve valuable equipment on the ocean floor.

The working group and the pop-up trap manufacturers were able to adapt the technology for use by the fishing industry. They created apps fishers can use to deploy, mark and retrieve each trap. The fisher simply selects the trap they want to pull up on their phone or tablet, and the app sends an acoustic signal to the specific trap, “kind of like a unique cellphone number,” said Shester. 

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife issued experimental fishing permits that allowed fishers who applied for them and paid for the gear to use it during the spring season while the fishery was closed to traditional crab fishers. 

In the past four years of testing by fishers, they’ve worked out many of the kinks. At first, fishers dropped individual traps. But even a modest-sized fishing boat uses a few hundred traps, and at $1,000 to $5,000 for each pop-up trap, that was too expensive for many fishers. And it was labor-intensive to haul single traps to the surface. 

But the price kept dropping, and by 2022, it reached around $100 to $300 per trap, which is comparable to traditional crab pots. Around the same time, fishers discovered that they could attach a pop-up trap at either end of a long line of regular traps, like a string of pearls resting on the bottom of the ocean. The full line with up to 50 traps could be hauled to the surface by a single pop-up trap, thus greatly reducing the investment by fishers and increasing efficiency. 

Fishers were concerned about how they would know where other traps were without a visual cue on the surface. If they accidentally dropped their traps on top of each other, it could become a tangled mess. The working group developed a centralized database so that regardless of which system was being used, every fisher could see the location of every trap on the sea floor. “You can see each other’s gear, and everyone can see each other,” Shester said. “It’s moving these fisheries into the 21st century.” 

Pop-up traps have been a divisive issue within the fishing industry, and have been criticized for being complicated, expensive, dangerous and exclusive. 

Although there was a learning curve, Melz said that it was overcome when another fisher showed him how to deploy the pots properly. After that, it was simple, he said: “It’s nice now for other people getting into it – all they have to do is watch a video and ask questions. The road has been paved.”

In 2024, Melz purchased 15 pop-up traps and a controller box for $15,000. Despite initial up-front costs, Melz was able to recoup his investment in one season. Using the string method, he deployed 150 traps and caught around $55,000 worth of crab. This year, he was able to deploy all 450 of the traps he is permitted to use, and brought in almost $150,000 worth of crab. 

The average fisher invests around $20,000 to $25,000 for traps, and has been able to make the cost back within a season, said Shester. Some fishers might need to get used to hauling up a string of traps, but there have been no safety issues to date, he said. 

Skeptics within the fishing industry feared that pop-up traps would completely erase traditional crabbing methods, but both Shester and Melz say that won’t happen. Pop-up traps aren’t appropriate for winter months when the swell is large because they’re difficult to retrieve, they said. “This is something for springtime conditions, when you don’t have the big storms, when there’s less fishermen out there,” said Shester. 

The ability to fish for crab in during the spring season without the risk of harming whales is a game-changer, said Melz. “The gear gives me the opportunity to get back on the water, hoping that good things happen.”

Khevin Mellegers is the only fisher in Santa Cruz who participated in the trials. Over the past three years and 568 trap drops into the water, he experienced only two gear failures, he said in a media release from Oceana. “My intentions were to do this for myself, my family, and also to help provide something for a lot of the other smaller boats,” he said in the release. Mellegers could not be reached for comment. 

Around 60 to 80 small-craft fishers used to fish in the spring, Shester estimated, and they hope to ramp up to those numbers. Fewer fishers participate in the spring crab season, because most of the larger boats move on to other fisheries like salmon, when it’s open, or sablefish. He and his colleagues are looking at the potential use of pop-up gear in other fisheries that have struggled with entanglements, like coon shrimp. 

Melz said that the return of the crab industry to Half Moon Bay last spring revitalized the entire area: “The harbor was full of people, and it was very heartwarming.” 

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