After the success of strategies to protect seabirds from longline fishing activities, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has urged regions using other industrial fishing techniques, such as trawl nets and gillnets, to implement safeguards in areas where seabirds are at greatest risk. Endangered seabirds are on threat from fishing. FAO suggested that these threats can be curbed by joint action.
Francis Chopin, a senior fishery officer with FAO, informed that with industry and government working as partners, the impacts of fishing can be greatly reduced. It is told that the practice of longline fishing, which involves boats trailing long lines bearing as many as 2,500 baited hooks, threatens seabirds that follow the vessel and dive for the bait, and in the absence of safeguards become hooked.
The technique of trawling in which the trailing of cone-shaped nets behind boats, large birds such as petrels and albatrosses are unable to maneuver out of the way of the fishing wires, while with the use of gillnets diving birds can become entangled in the long line of netting following the vessel. FAO reported a significant decrease in collateral damage to seabirds worldwide in areas where safeguards to lessen the impact of longline fishing have been implemented.
