KEY LARGO, Fla. — August 18, 2014 — Florida poachers can be pretty creative. The problem is that after the individuals are caught, the devices they used for their illegal efforts often continue to impact marine resources.
That's why a team from NOAA Fisheries is now in the Keys searching for and removing building materials from the water used in a large lobster poaching operation.
Instead of traps, the operation used what are known as casitas, which is Spanish for little houses. Made from cinder blocks, lumber and sheets of metal, casitas have been described by NOAA marine habitat restoration specialist Sean Meehan as looking like coffee tables that are six inches high. They provide good hiding places for lobsters, which gather under the casitas.
In the Keys, casitas are generally placed in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay. Poachers know where their casitas are located, so when they need to catch a bunch of lobsters, they dive on the illegal habitats and clean them out.
According to NOAA, casitas have been used to catch as many as 1,500 lobsters in a day. The legal daily commercial catch limit is 250 lobsters.
The NOAA team, led by Meehan, hopes to remove 300 casitas from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The sanctuary consists of 2,900 square nautical miles of waters from Key Largo to the Dry Tortugas.
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