I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.
I’ve always thought that Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a gloomy poem. The albatross brought good luck to the ship as its appearance heralded the parting of the ice and a good wind to fill the sails, but killing the albatross, with his crossbow, brought the Ancient Mariner’s ship to disaster with all his fellow crew dying.
The world’s albatrosses are being killed by us, not with crossbows but with fishing gear, including trawls (the birds collide with the trawl cables or ‘warps’) but it is the mortality caused by longlines which has received most attention. The oceans over which the albatrosses travel with their stiff wings are fished by vessels catching tuna, swordfish and toothfish on lines from a few to many tens of kilometres in length.
Baited hooks, often with squid, are set from the back of fishing boats. Albatrosses regularly follow fishing boats, just as they did the Ancient Mariner’s vessel, to grab food such as fish guts that are discarded overboard. A lump of squid on a hook entering the water looks like an easy meal to an albatross and they are often caught and drowned in those few moments as the baited hook enters the water and before it sinks to a safe depth.
Albatrosses live long lives (up to 60 years), only start to breed at around 10 years of age and most of the larger species produce just a single egg every couple of years, making them highly vulnerable to threats such as longlining. Seventeen of the world’s 22 albatrosses are threatened with extinction and deaths from longlining provide the greatest collective threat to these iconic birds of the southern oceans.
Fishermen aren’t trying to catch albatrosses – indeed any baited hook that catches an albatross as it enters the water can’t be catching a valuable fish and so it’s in the fishermen’s interest to reduce these albatross bycatches even though in these days of high tech ocean-going vessels they are unlikely to suffer Coleridge’s death, dehydration and disaster by killing an albatross or two.
Different fisheries catch different fish in different ways and affect different albatrosses but a range of simple solutions exist to reduce needless albatross deaths; bird scaring streamers, setting fishing lines through underwater chutes at the back of vessels, dying the baits to makes them less attractive to the birds, reducing discharge of fish offal when lines are set, adding heavier weights to the lines so that the period of vulnerability is reduced and more.
The BirdLife International albatross task force is deploying all of these methods through working with fishermen on land and at sea. It’s a great success. Fishermen are keen to reduce albatross bycatch – all the more so when they learn of the effect of those catches on albatross populations. Read about the Task Force members’ adventures and successes here.
And these measures work. Albatross deaths in South African waters have already been reduced by 85% thanks to the work of the Albatross Task Force with the South African Tuna Longline Association. Similar success has been achieved in Brazil and hopes are high for future successes elsewhere.
So it’s not such a gloomy tale these days. Perhaps we need a more upbeat Rime of the Modern Albatross-Friendly Mariner who can go on his way a happier and a wiser man?
There is a really simple step you can take to help Albatrosses... If you send us your used postage stamps, we can convert them to cash. In 2011 our supporters’ stamps helped us raise a whopping £15,000!
Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference. His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB. Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.