Albatrosses are among the most endangered bird families on Earth, with longline fishing bycatch and plastic ocean pollution causing deaths and injuries that are entirely preventable with known mitigation measures.
Albatross welfare is threatened by two forms of human-caused harm operating at ocean scale. Longline bycatch causes drowning when birds dive for baited hooks and are dragged underwater — death is not instantaneous but occurs over minutes as the bird struggles. The high intelligence and pair-bond fidelity of albatrosses makes loss of a mate particularly significant — widowed birds show disrupted breeding behavior for years. Plastic ingestion by chicks fed contaminated food by parents causes gastric impaction, malnutrition, and death — chick stomachs recovered from breeding colonies are found packed with bottle caps, lighters, and fragments. These are not inevitable consequences of fishing or ocean plastic but preventable harms with known solutions. Bird-scaring lines and line-weighting are cheap and effective — their failure to be universally adopted is a policy failure, not a technical one.