Longline fishing catches hundreds of thousands of seabirds annually as bycatch, including albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters. Simple mitigation measures can dramatically reduce this toll.
Seabirds caught on longlines experience a violent and distressing death — they are hooked while diving for bait, dragged underwater, and drowned. This represents both a significant welfare problem for individual birds and a conservation crisis for species that reproduce slowly. The good news is that proven, low-cost mitigation measures exist. The welfare and conservation imperative is identical: fishing fleets must adopt these measures universally.