Cetacean bycatch — accidental entanglement in fishing gear — kills hundreds of thousands of dolphins, porpoises, and whales annually and is the leading human threat to many species.
Cetacean bycatch causes drowning in air-breathing mammals who may struggle for minutes before death. Even non-lethal entanglement causes severe injuries — rope cuts into flippers and bodies, leaving wounds that cause chronic pain and infection. For highly social, long-lived species like dolphins, each death removes an individual with decades of potential life and established social bonds. Species-level impacts in critically endangered populations — where individual bycatch deaths directly affect survival probability — make cetacean bycatch simultaneously a welfare, conservation, and ethical emergency.