Longline fishing kills hundreds of thousands of seabirds annually as bycatch, causing painful drowning deaths and threatening vulnerable populations including albatrosses.
Seabird bycatch in longline fisheries causes a form of welfare harm that is particularly accessible to intervention: effective mitigation measures exist and have been demonstrated to work across multiple fisheries. The welfare experience of a bird caught on a longline hook involves acute pain from hook penetration followed by drowning as the weighted line sinks. The mortality is not instantaneous and the experience is distressing for a highly cognitive animal. The conservation dimension is severe for albatrosses, whose long lifespans, low reproductive rates, and pair-bond dependency mean that adult mortality has catastrophic population effects. The existence of effective, inexpensive mitigation measures that fishing operators resist adopting without regulatory requirements means that seabird bycatch represents a solvable welfare problem whose solution requires political will rather than technical innovation.