Is It The End Of The Line For The Albatross?

[mrmoshe]

Is it the end of the line for the albatross?

THE ocean-roaming albatross, once believed to carry the souls of dead sailors, is sliding towards extinction.

The United Nations estimates 300,000 seabirds a year drown on the end of longline fishing hooks, with 16 species of albatross accounting for up to a third of the carnage.

But The Sunday Age has learnt that a secret Australian project — involving scientists and international fisheries — is poised to help save the most elegant of birds and its near relatives.

A former Queensland tuna fisherman, Hans Jusseit, has invented a "smart hook" that does not snare diving seabirds or critically endangered turtles.

He expects the smart hook will be in production by the middle of next year, but field-testing by local scientists, including a world-ranked seabird expert, Barry Baker, is needed first. "And we're already 10 years too late," says Mr Jusseit, who in his fishing days saw Mr Baker as an adversary.

There are a recorded 2 billion longline hooks being trawled around the globe. But because of illegal fishing, under-quoting by commercial fisheries and other factors, estimates of up 10 billion hooks "have real credibility", says Mr Jusseit.

In longline fishing, the baited hooks are set on lines up to 150 kilometres long.

Seabirds, notably albatrosses and their tube-nosed cousins, the petrels, mistake the bait for fish and squid, and become snagged on the hooks while on the hunt. If they don't drown, they may have their beaks torn off and starve to death.

The smart hook development is being kept under wraps, in part because previous technological innovations failed to deliver on their much-hyped promise. About seven years ago, when the matter first came to wider public attention, another Australian invention called "the chute" was prematurely hailed as the "save-a-tross".

While it has had success in saving birds in the Hawaiian swordfish industry, the chute was found to drown deep-diving birds such as petrels in the southern oceans, and became known, as one scientist described it, as the "cone of death".

The inventor of the chute, Dr Nigel Brothers — formerly with the Tasmanian Government and now working overseas — did pioneering work in the mid-1990s that showed seabirds were being killed in huge numbers by longline fishing.

Much of his research was carried out on Japanese ships still operating in Australian waters at that time. According to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, in waters below 30 degrees south, between January 1 and December 31, 1994, the Japanese tuna longline boats set 13,720,283 million hooks that killed an estimated 4645 birds. (The estimated total Japanese kill across the southern oceans was 44,000 birds, according to international observers.)

In the same patch of water, Australian domestic operators set 2,219,408 hooks that killed 2108 birds — based on calculations by the Tasmanian Department of Parks, Wildlife and Heritage.

The Japanese tuna boats left Australian waters in 1997. They now admit to killing 9000 seabirds a year in the southern oceans. But given the recent scandal that found they were under-quoting the tuna catch by two thirds, it is not unreasonable to suggest their annual bird kill could be as high as 27,000. The other big offenders are southern African nations — which are killing 34,000 birds a year, according to Birdlife International — and South American countries.

Since 1999, Australian fleets have been working under a threat abatement plan drawn up by the Australian Antarctic Division. The plan's measures include trailing a tori, or bird-scaring line of pretty streamers, setting hooks only at night and using fast-sinking lines that set below the surface before the birds can get to them.

The guidelines were most recently revised in 2006 under the direction of Mr Baker, who has since quit a long government career for consultancy work. Mr Baker prefers his scientific papers to do the talking for him, but told The Sunday Age that Australian fleets "have come a long way, but could still do better".

According to a paper published by Mr Baker and others last year, 1030 seabirds were killed across three fishing zones. Of those, Mr Baker says, no more than 100 were albatrosses. "Probably not even 100," he said. "It's been reduced to a trivial level."

The fisheries authority claims a more startling reduction. It says that .03 birds were killed for every 1000 hooks set. There were 8.8 million hooks set in the Eastern Tuna and Billfish Fishery, which extends in a thick band from Cape York down to Tasmania. If correct, this means 264 seabirds were killed.

The previous year, the kill rate was .02 per 1000 hooks, or 176 dead birds.

Under the threat abatement plan, the approved rate of kills is .05 birds per 1000 hooks.

As one academic described the conflicting numbers: "Australia is one of the good guys. It's just a matter of knowing how good we really are."

with LUCINDA ORMONDE

■Breeding pairs of albatross raise one slow-growing chick at a time. ■The chicks take up to 20 years to become sexually mature.

■The wandering albatross only breeds every two years.

■The albatross spends most of its life in the air and out at sea.

■The wandering albatross is known to live to 50 years.

■The United Nations Environment Program believes that up to 100,000 albatrosses are being killed annually by longline fishing. Australian scientists believe the figure is closer to 30,000.

[DaveD]

Now that is a real tragedy. Pity, like the fellow implied in the articled, why wasn't action taken to prevent the disasters earlier...just like other wildlife.

[Davemmm]

Now that is a real tragedy. Pity, like the fellow implied in the articled, why wasn't action taken to prevent the disasters earlier...just like other wildlife.

The answer to that is the same as the answer to most other of the worlds problems: too many people and too much greed

[DaveD]

Good point