NOAA Fisheries Continues to Tackle Seabird Bycatch Issue

"Seabirds with longline fishing vessel" by NOAA-NMFS is licensed under Public Domain

This year, the NOAA Fisheries National Seabird Program (NSP) awarded $85,500 in FY16 for internal projects addressing seabird bycatch and ecosystem indicators related to seabirds. The projects awarded were as follows:

• Estimating and understanding the seabird bycatch of the U.S. Atlantic pelagic longline fleet (NOAA Fisheries Southeast Science Center)
• Streamer line distribution in Alaska (NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office)
• Development of educational video for seabird handling techniques for Hawaii longline fishermen and NOAA Fisheries observers (NOAA Fisheries Pacific Islands Regional Office)
  • Seabird training for Alaska groundfish observers (NOAA Fisheries Alaska Science Center)
  • Pacific seabird bycatch necropsy program (NOAA Fisheries Alaska Science Center)
  • Linking at-sea conditions with the coast-wide Cassin's Auklet mass mortality event of 2014-2015: understanding effects of the Warm Blob on the California Current Ecosystem through a seabird indicator species (NOAA Fisheries Northwest Science Center)

This work continues to complement and support the successes of the NOAA Fisheries project

Preventing Migratory Seabird Mortality in U.S. West Coast Groundfish Longline Fisheries, which won the Presidential Migratory Bird Federal Stewardship Award in 2015. For this project, NOAA Fisheries partnered with fishermen, government, academia, and industry for an effort that reduced seabird bycatch in the U.S. West Coast groundfish longline fishery through the use of streamer lines. NOAA Fisheries worked with fishermen to find a way to keep seabirds, including endangered species, off the fishing hooks in this fishery. Streamer lines, a low tech and inexpensive method, were the solution. A video about their success is available online here.