Marine mammals including whales, dolphins, and porpoises are regularly caught incidentally in fishing gear, causing significant welfare harm and threatening some populations with extinction.
Marine mammal bycatch causes welfare harm on a massive scale, with hundreds of thousands of highly intelligent, long-lived, socially complex animals killed annually as a consequence of fishing operations. The welfare cost of entanglement includes not just death but prolonged suffering as animals struggle against gear before drowning or exhaustion. For social species including dolphins and orcas, the welfare impact of bycatch mortality extends to surviving social group members whose social structures are disrupted by individual losses. The vaquita represents the most urgent case — with fewer than 10 individuals, one entanglement event could drive a porpoise species to extinction. Acoustic deterrents and gear modifications offer practical solutions that are insufficiently deployed at global scale.