During the Southern Hemisphere summer, the Uruguayan swordfish fishery diminishes and several vessels reduce their number of sea trips. Only a single vessel remained active during January. This is a great opportunity for us to spread awareness about our work, taking to the fishing industry information about the Albatross Task Force and about finding solutions to reduce the mortality of seabirds.
With this as a motive, I have recently been working with Martín Abreu on various conservation awareness articles. We will publish these articles in our bulletin – Boletín Atlantico Sur – aimed at captains and crew of the fishing vessels and people involved with the fishery, essentially the entire Uruguayan fisheries sector.
It is important that as many people involved with the fishing industry as possible are aware of our work and realise what we are doing. Our work at-sea means that each trip we learn more about the species that visit Uruguayan waters, what impacts the fleet has on seabirds and most importantly, which are the best mitigation measures to prevent this interaction.
Two months ago, we came to an important point in the work we are carrying out to test the efficiency of tori lines in Uruguay. The results suggest that the use of a tori line successfully reduces the incidental mortality of seabirds associated with pelagic longline fisheries. However, the study is not complete and we need to continue the data collection before obtaining a definite conclusion. The results are very promising though and up to this point, we have not recorded a single mortality when we use a tori line.
Therefore, the article that we are writing for the Boletín Atlantico Sur is without doubt the piece that gives me most satisfaction. Whilst we are testing the tori lines onboard, little by little the captains are seeing that they are of use and not as complicated as they previously thought. It is true that they can become entangled from time to time but this is certainly something we can improve on.
Today we have a good message to give: the capture of seabirds can be reduced if we use a very simple mitigation measure.