Longline fishing kills hundreds of thousands of seabirds annually when they dive for bait and become hooked. Simple and cost-effective mitigation measures can dramatically reduce this preventable welfare harm.
Longline bycatch causes drowning death in seabirds that dive to reach baited hooks during line setting. The bird is hooked through the beak or body and pulled underwater as the line sinks, unable to escape and drowning within minutes. The scale of this mortality, affecting hundreds of thousands of highly sentient seabirds including albatrosses with cognitive complexity comparable to primates, represents an enormous ongoing welfare crisis. The high cost-effectiveness of mitigation measures makes continuation of this mortality increasingly unjustifiable: tori lines costing USD 50 per set, combined with night setting and line weighting, achieve 80-98% reduction in bycatch. The primary barrier to adoption is lack of regulatory requirements rather than cost or technical difficulty.