Bycatch in global fisheries kills hundreds of millions of non-target animals annually, including sea turtles, sharks, rays, marine mammals, and seabirds, causing welfare harms at enormous scale.
Fisheries bycatch is one of the numerically largest sources of wild animal death and suffering on the planet. Hundreds of millions of animals — turtles, sharks, seabirds, dolphins, non-target fish — are killed or injured annually as an accepted cost of catching target species. The welfare harm of bycatch is diffuse, largely invisible, and occurs in waters distant from consumer consciousness. Yet for each individual sea turtle tangled in a net, each shark drowned on a longline, each seabird crushed in a trawl, the experience is acute and real. Available bycatch reduction technologies can meaningfully reduce this toll where adopted.