Longline fishing kills hundreds of thousands of seabirds annually when they attempt to take bait from lines. Proven mitigation measures can dramatically reduce this devastating bycatch.
Seabirds drowned on longlines experience a particularly distressing death — hooked through the bill or body, dragged beneath the surface, and unable to breathe. The scale of this mortality is catastrophic for slow-reproducing species like albatrosses, which raise only one chick per year. Mitigation tools are well understood, cost-effective, and proven: tori lines, weighted gear to speed sinking, and night-setting when seabirds are less active can each reduce bycatch by 80-90%. The barrier to adoption is will — both from fishing operators and the regulatory agencies that should require mitigation as standard.