Sea Turtle Bycatch: Accidental Capture and Welfare Impacts

All seven species of sea turtle are threatened with extinction, and accidental capture in fishing gear remains one of the most serious causes of mortality and suffering.

Key Facts

An estimated 85,000 sea turtles are captured in trawl fisheries annually in the Northwest Atlantic alone
Circle hooks reduce sea turtle bycatch by up to 90% compared with J-hooks in longline fisheries
Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) allow turtles to escape trawl nets and are mandatory in many fisheries
Leatherback turtles often ingest plastic bags, confusing them with jellyfish prey — a welfare and conservation crisis
Bycatch entanglement results in drowning, flipper amputations and internal injuries

Welfare Considerations

Sea turtles drowned in fishing gear experience a prolonged death by asphyxiation. Those entangled in ghost gear — abandoned nets and lines — may struggle for hours or days before drowning, being weakened by exhaustion and starvation. Turtles that survive capture with hooks lodged in their throats or oesophagus face chronic injury and starvation. The welfare cost is experienced by animals that may be over 100 years old and may have survived a century of other challenges, only to die in a net or on a hook within minutes of an encounter with fishing gear.

What You Can Do

Support fisheries that use circle hooks and TEDs as minimum standards
Choose seafood certified by organisations that verify sea turtle bycatch mitigation
Donate to the Sea Turtle Conservancy and similar organisations funding bycatch research
Participate in beach clean-ups that remove ghost gear — abandoned nets and monofilament line
Advocate for mandatory TED use in all trawl fisheries where sea turtles are present