Hundreds of thousands of seabirds are killed annually as bycatch in fishing operations, causing significant welfare harms and threatening already declining populations.
Drowning as bycatch is a genuinely distressing death for seabirds. The animal becomes entangled, attempts to free itself, and is dragged underwater while continuing to struggle until it drowns. This process may take many minutes. For birds like albatrosses — long-lived, slowly reproducing species with complex social structures and mate bonds — each individual death also represents significant conservation loss. The fact that effective mitigation measures exist and are relatively inexpensive makes the continued scale of seabird bycatch particularly morally troubling.