RSPB- Global seabird appeal-

On behalf of the RSPB – click here to read the information directly on RSPB’s website:

Every year, hundreds of thousands of seabirds drown needlessly in fishing gear

About

A fishing catastrophe is driving seabirds to extinction. You can help save hundreds of thousands of seabirds from drowning needlessly every year.

Imagine diving into the sea, only to find yourself trapped beneath the surface, never to take another breath. That’s how hundreds of thousands of seabirds are dying every year, when they dive for food and get caught in fishing gear.

Known as ‘bycatch’, this is a global issue that has dragged the most iconic group of seabirds, the albatrosses, among others, into the depths of an extinction crisis. But you can help prevent these tragic losses, by donating to the RSPB’s Global Seabird Appeal today.

What we’ll be doing

Your donation is critical for two RSPB-led projects that protect seabirds from fishing gear.

Firstly, you can help to build on the Albatross Task Force’s (ATF) decade of progress, successfully protecting albatrosses in the Southern Hemisphere. Secondly, you can help the BirdLife Seabird Task Force – a joint RSPB-BirdLife International project – follow in the ATF’s footsteps as we seek to tackle a major emerging threat to the world’s seabirds – gillnet fisheries.

Nobody wants to see seabirds drowning. Especially the world’s fishermen. That’s why we’re collaborating with them, working shoulder-to-shoulder to overcome this global crisis.

Turn the tide with the Albatross Task Force

Interview with the RSPB’s Oli Yates

For 10 years, the Albatross Task Force (ATF) has been working in eight different countries, taking to the oceans in the name of scientific research, tackling 10 of the most deadly fisheries for albatrosses in the world.

Our dedicated instructors work alongside fishermen in notoriously difficult conditions, even battling the tempestuous South Atlantic Ocean. It’s a gruesome part of day-to-day life to see the corpse of a giant bird, with a wingspan of over three metres, being hauled on deck.

But, by working with fishermen who want to protect these wonderful birds, and by utilising many years of knowledge on how to solve this problem, the ATF have focused on three methods that are highly effective:

colourful streamers that scare away seabirds
weights to sink dangerous hooks out of reach of the birds
setting the lines at night when fewer seabirds are active.

These methods have been adopted in 7 out of 10 of our priority fisheries. It’s huge progress in a short period of time. But, still, albatrosses are fighting extinction. Your donation is crucial for the ATF’s next five years, when you can help to strengthen and broaden our work.

The birds affected

Black-browed albatross drowned in fishing gear

Gillnets – a catastrophe for seabirds

While albatrosses are needlessly drowning due to longline and trawl fisheries, gillnetting is an even more deadly form of fishing that, worldwide, is killing yet more seabirds.

Gillnets are made from a fine nylon that’s essentially invisible underwater. The fishermen only want to catch fish – but they’re also entangling over 400,000 seabirds a year, including guillemots, razorbills and long-tailed ducks.

You can help by supporting BirdLife International’s Seabird Task Force with your gift today. Your donation today can help us:

pinpoint the most dangerous fisheries
find ways to make gillnets more visible for seabirds
work with fishermen to find the best methods
put our research into practice worldwide.

As we’ve seen in the achievements of the ATF, this is truly a model of success. It means we can go to fisheries across the globe and show them that we can be trusted, that our methods work, and that our only agenda is to stop seabirds from dying.

But, for the inspiring work of our Task Forces to continue over the next five years, they desperately require funding. To save the lives of hundreds of thousands of seabirds, we need your help.

Donate now

Donating online is easy and ensures that more of your money is used for conservation.

Donate now

Or you can also donate by:

Telephone: Our Supporter Services team can also take donations over the phone. Call 01767 693 680, 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday

Post: We can accept donations by cheque too. Please make cheques payable to The RSPB and send them to: Global Seabird appeal, The RSPB, The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire, SG19 2DL

Why we need your help

More than 100,000 albatrosses still die in fishing gear each year, but the Albatross Task Force has developed methods to stop this. Meantime, gillnets entangle over 400,000 seabirds a year, but fishermen are desperate for a solution to these unnecessary deaths. Please help to get our sealife off the hook.

£10	could pay towards equipment for a Task Force instructor
£25	could pay towards sending a Task Force instructor to sea for a day
£50	could pay towards our vital advocacy work.

Donate today

Global Seabird appeal

A fishing catastrophe is driving seabirds to extinction. You can help save hundreds of thousands of seabirds from drowning needlessly every year.

Uncategorized

Analyse this…

As we embark on our second season of data collection in Lithuania, we highlight what we learned from analysing our first season’s data.

While raw figures might make interesting reading, when it comes to thinking about bycatch, we need to analyse our data to draw useful conclusions about how effective our net panels might be in reducing seabird mortality in gillnet fisheries.

One of the difficulties with almost all bycatch data, irrespective of fishery or accidentally captured species, is that it is usually a rare, sporadic event – this means that our data set contains lots of zeros, when there was no bycatch at all. Most means of analysis don’t cope particularly well with this – but thankfully, there are ways!

Without getting into the details (we will aim to publish our results in full once we have completed our next field season), the mean number of birds caught per set was about a third lower in our experimental sets with net panels (mean of 0.37 birds/set) than control sets (0.54/set). While this is an encouraging result, this difference was not statistically significant. Given this outcome, we are undertaking further trials this winter in Lithuania, continuing to conduct paired trials to bottom-out whether these net panels might have utility in reducing seabird bycatch in the Baltic. The signs are encouraging, but more work is required!

One interesting (and statistically significant!) result is that total fish catch was actually higher in the nets carrying panels compared to standard gillnets (a graph below if you’re interested!). This is an important result, as technical mitigation is unlikely to be popular with fishermen if it negatively affects catch. We’ll continue to keep a close eye on how net panels affect target catch…

Total fish catch in control and experimental nets. Horizontal lines are the median, boxes the interquartile range, error bars the 95% CI, and dots are final outliers

Thanks to Alex Bond of RSPB for carrying out the analysis!

Lithuania

First measures to reduce seabird bycatch in Portugal

By Iván Gutiérrez and Ana Santos, SPEA Bycatch Observers.

The team is focused on the contrast panels at the moment. We are getting them manufactured and deploying them in the water to make some preliminary tests. The aim is to have those 100% ready so we can start the mitigation tests to reduce seabird bycatch in Portuguese gillnet fisheries in September. So far, so good!

[This post is a follow up from: Seabird Task Force sets sail in Portugal]

When we received the news that the project had been approved we felt the hurry to start as soon as possible. But Christmas arrived and we hadn’t had enough time to search for a company to produce the contrast panels. We wanted to start right away so we decided to go the artisanal way – the team and their families started manufacturing the panels themselves!

The specific materials needed to resist salt water so they were not easy to find, but once we found them, the work went very well – about a third of the panels are done now! While some of us are still sewing, others are already fixing the contrast panels on the gillnets (those kindly provided by the team in Lithuania – thank you!).

At the end of April we started the on-board observations with the modified nets. This first test is very important in order to understand how practical the panels are for the fishermen. We also need to see which adjustments and changes need to be made to guarantee that in the next winter everything is operational for the real mitigation tests.

Contrast panels attached to the fishing net © SPEA

Until now the preliminary tests have gone very well. The presence of the panels in the gillnets does not seem to affect fish catch. In fact, the opposite happened: during test days catches were higher in the modified nets. More importantly, the modified nets do not disturb the fishers’ work which is one of our priorities.

In order to analyze the measures from an economic point of view, we are collecting data about the fish catches – total catch, species and fish size. We measure a determined fish sample from fishing events with and without panels in order to understand the differences.

On the trip back to the port, the fishermen had a big smile on their faces, because they initially thought that fish catch would be poor with these modified nets and that it would be difficult to work with these panels. Fortunately, the results have been quite positive and we are very pleased.

The next weeks we will continue to make on-board observations and testing these first mitigation measures in gillnets in Portugal.

It’s too early for conclusions, but hopefully the results will remain positive!

Portugal

Lights burn bright but no fish in sight

By Tomasz Linkowski & Anetta Ameryk, Polish National Marine Fisheries Research Institute NMFRI

The weather was fine but unfortunately the same could not be said about the fish. For over six months, fish have been “swept away” from the Puck Bay region. Fishers are constantly going out at sea, most of the time coming back empty-handed. Unfortunately, despite the lack of fish, we have still recorded some cases of seabird bycatch. We took the chance to try out our latest measures to keep seabirds out of gillnets!

As the catches were unprofitable, if it wasn’t for the project agreement, it’s very likely the fishers would have left ports much less frequently – but this was really an opportunity for us to check whether the net lights faced any operational issues in deployment.

Seabird bycatch was recorded despite the lack of fish, highlighting the importance to optimize our proposed measures to tackle the problem © Anetta Ameryk/Morski Instytut Rybacki

We had hoped to do similar testing with the West Pomeranian coastal fleet targetting herring, but this fleet had already switched on to fishing other species. Therefore in that region we will undertake all our studies in the autumn and winter of 2016/17.

The first light we tried out with the Puck Bay fleet was the YML-1000 lights we described in the previous entry. In the video below, you can see the fishermen attaching the lights to the nets.

Unfortunately, the lamps do seem to be affecting the fishing operations considerably. The boats need to slow down when deploying and retrieving the nets. When we deploy the nets, each lamp has to be held by hand in order to prevent them from hooking on the meshes below (see video below).

On top of that, when retrieving, it is necessary to hold the lights so as not to hit the deck which might risk damaging.

Over the summer, we’ll discuss these issues with other projects that have deployed net lights to see if there are helpful ways to work around the difficulties and speed up the operation.

In more encouraging news, after 240 hours of use, which is the time the nets were in the water, the lamps powered by two AA batteries were still shining. Battery life will be a very important part of the economic efficiency of this measure. And it is not only the cost of the battery, but the time needed to replace them through the entire set of nets.

Based on these initial results, it was clear it would be challenging to obtain statistically verifiable data on seabird bycatch for the time being. After 10 cruises, while it was useful to examine the operational issues with our measures, we decided to cease observations for the season.

The rest of the studies will be conducted at the end of this year or at the beginning of 2017. Feel free to sign up if you don’t want to miss our updates!

Poland

International workshop on Marine Important Bird Areas in the Mediterranean

An international workshop on Marine Important Bird Areas in Malta and the Mediterranean will be held between the 23rd – 25th November 2015 by the LIFE+ Malta Seabird Project and BirdLife International. The workshop will be a key opportunity to gather knowledge and experience on protecting seabirds across national boundaries and international waters of the Mediterranean as well as set the way forward for international collaborations in protecting our common seabird heritage.

Within the Mediterranean seabirds face threats both on land and at sea, such as overfishing, by-catch, invasive predators, habitat destruction from poor planning and marine pollution. However only 4% of the Mediterranean is currently protected through the EU Natura 2000 network in Europe and the Barcelona Convention’s Specially Protected Areas of Mediterranean Importance.

At a regional scale there are still many important gaps to fill in the protected area network for seabirds, particularly for sites at sea. The meeting will enable scientists, nature conservationists and policy makers to further coordinate efforts for seabird protection at a regional scale through capacity building and the sharing of specialist knowledge.

The meeting will start with the presentation of a draft inventory of Marine Important Bird Areas for seabirds in Maltese and international waters identified under the LIFE+ Malta Seabird Project. This will be followed by sessions on knowledge sharing and gap analysis for the entire Mediterranean region, identifying sites within and beyond national jurisdiction, priority areas and policy mechanisms from across the Mediterranean.

Find out more, including to download the registration form, here.

Reblog: originally posted in LIFE+ Malta Seabird Project.

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Stopping gillnet bycatch – how do we do it?

Spring is arriving all over Europe, and everyone is looking forward to longer days, more sunshine and wildlife waking up again. I love spring myself, and I’m not a glutton for punishment, but I have been casting my mind back to a snowy week in West Virginia, USA, at the end of January.

It’s not because I’m pining for the cold, but because it was then that we ran a workshop with the American Bird Conservancy focussing on the development of technical measures to reduce bycatch in gillnet fisheries. Working with researchers, fishermen, NGOs and sensory ecologists from across the world, we were looking to go beyond national and species-group silos to discuss innovative ideas to reduce gillnet bycatch – something which we are actively trying to tackle in Lithuania as part of this project.

The core purpose of the workshop was to come up with some specific project proposals to test ideas for bycatch mitigation, ideally with a cross-taxa focus – covering at least two out of three of birds, turtles and marine mammals. If you’re a bycatch geek, we hope to post a link to the full report of the workshop here soon – so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, here are few reflections from the workshop from me:

We need to work across species and sectors

Gillnet bycatch is a global issue of major concern – as sea turtle expert Bryan Wallace put it: ‘Net bycatch has the highest cumulative severity across air-breathing megafauna taxa of any major fishing gear category’. There is thus much to be gained by working across species groups. The literature on mitigating this problem is far richer for e.g. cetaceans than it is for seabirds. Ideas that have shown potential for one species (or group of species) could show promise for others – see, for example, John Wang’s work on net lighting for turtles – how might this apply to velvet scoter or bottlenose dolphins?

Something that came up time and again at the workshop was the need to work with fishermen. Fishermen understand their gear, have insights into interactions with non-target species and understand the practical realities of deploying mitigation measures in their fishing operations. This approach is central to what we are doing with the Seabird Task Force, and is an approach that BirdLife truly pioneered with the Albatross Task Force.

We need to better understand interactions with gillnets

Turtles, seabirds and marine mammals often become entangled in nets away from the human gaze, which means our understanding of how bycaught animals interact with gillnets is poor. Better understanding othese interactions – perhaps utilising advancing camera technology – will surely help us unlock solutions. It might allow us to key in on particular aspects of behaviour around nets to reduce the likelihood of entanglement.

We need to approach the problem from a sensory ecology perspective

Or in more straightforward language – we need to understand how species see, hear, feel (perhaps even smell and taste!) the world, so that we can design appropriate mitigation measures. I won’t spend much time on this here, but you can read a blog I wrote about it here – where you can also access the paper this blog was based on.

We need to get out there and test stuff!

The only way we will develop solutions is to get out on vessels and start testing some ideas! Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting slap-dash poor experimentation without proper thought. Well thought-out ideas, understanding the fundamentals of sensory ecology and thinking about the type of interaction an animal has with a net are all important – that’s why I mention them first – but we need to start getting our hands salty and seeing what works and what doesn’t. It’s in that spirit that the Seabird Task Force was founded, and it’s in that spirit that we hope to find solutions to the problem of gillnet bycatch in the Baltic – and beyond.

Lithuania