Hidden under the aquamarine waters of the Florida Keys, debris from last year's Hurricane Irma.

Thousands of damaged lobster traps littering the sea floor,

abandoned fishing ropes twisting among its crucial coral reefs.

This marine debris is a threat to wildlife and a hindrance to the economic welfare of those who make their living from the sea.

But could an initiative to clean it all up, turn the tide.

Music But couldn't initiative to clean it all up, turn the tie. On the Gulf of Mexico, I'm Ann Thompson, and this is NBC on Earth.

So this is what they're catching.

This is a spiny lobster.

And unlike the lobsters of New England that have the big claws, these don't.

And they are spawned in the Caribbean and then they come up and they grow up here in the Florida Keys.

But now, fisherman Jeff Kramer is hauling in a different kind of catch.

So where are we heading?

We are heading right here.

There's a few scattered traps from the hurricane.

We usually just come up to a single trap and we'll pull it up and it's fairly easy. Now are these traps where they should be or?

No, no, these were displaced from the hurricane. It could have come from 10 miles away and

pushed through the bridge and over here. Actually this area we're in right now, there

was probably a thousand traps moved from the ocean side into here and

what we do is normally what we and what we did this storm is we'll bring our

traps from the ocean side as many as we can get you know because with the weather

forecasting you don't really know until a couple days really where it's gonna

go you know so we try and move, start moving our traps, but it takes, it takes a long time. It takes 30 days for me to get my traps in, so, you know, it takes a while to get them moved in. So we'll put them in here because in a normal hurricane, this is protected, and the traps will be in perfect we put them in a line here

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