The Marine Conservation Alliance (MCA) is getting ready to address the issues of bycatch and marine debris reduction at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society (AFS) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, next week. The theme of the meeting is “Fisheries in Flux: How Do We Ensure Our Sustainable Future.”
Dave Benton, executive director of MCA and MCA Foundation, informed that two key issues affecting fisheries sustainability are the reduction of bycatch, the incidental harvest of non-target species, and the problem of plastic pollution in our marine environment. He added that MCA’s booth will document work toward the design of halibut and salmon excluder devices for trawl nets as well as our nationally-recognized efforts at marine debris cleanup.
It is said that the MCA Foundation’s marine debris cleanup work, with support from NOAA, removed over 175 metric tons of mostly plastic debris from the Alaska shoreline last year and is on a pace to equal that in 2008. For such a task the clean up work got the prestigious NOAA’s Sustainable Fisheries Leadership Award for coastal habitat restoration earlier this year.
