Towing the Line



The U.S. is setting the standard for ecologically sustainable longline fishing. Now it's time to make sure the rest of the world gets onboard.
By Ted Williams Published: September-October 2013
In 1991 the United States banned large pelagic driftnets because of the enormous "bycatch" of seabirds, sea turtles, marine mammals, and non-target fish. So commercial fishermen began switching to longlining. Gear can consist of up to 55 miles of main line with 1,400 600-foot branch lines from which dangle thousands of baited hooks.



The United States is the world leader in innovations to reduce longlining bycatch of birds, but we haven't come nearly as far with protections for non-target fish and sea turtles. Many other nations don't use mitigation for any kind of bycatch. Largely as a result, about half of the world's petrels and most of the albatrosses are threatened with extinction.



"We don't want it to be regulatory for the U.S. industry," says Mike Daulton, Audubon's vice president of government relations, who has launched an intensive lobbying effort to get Congress to join ACAP. "We want it to be something that gets other countries up to our standards. You would think longliners would want to be pulling in lucrative fish, not drowned seabirds. What in the world would be the interest in not doing mitigation considering how inexpensive it is?"

A hundred dollars is all a captain has to pay for a very effective seabird mitigation device--a line with streamers attached that hangs from a high point on the vessel and is dragged in the water. The flapping streamers scare birds away from the bait, giving it a chance to sink out of reach.

"ACAP would help us protect some of the most endangered birds on the globe," adds Daulton. "And from a business standpoint, it would make our domestic fisheries more competitive by forcing foreign fleets to implement our best management practices. As of now there's no opposition."



Melvin served on a working group of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources--the international collaboration that made best-practices recommendations for seabird conservation in fisheries and put itself out of business with perhaps the most stunning bycatch success story to date. Bird bycatch was reduced to near zero with streamers; fishing at night, when the birds have trouble seeing baits; limiting fishing to the birds' non-breeding season; and using weights that kept baits (set for Patagonian toothfish, a.k.a. Chilean seabass) below bird diving range.


I am unpopular with longliners because I used to write articles about them with titles like "The Pelagic Plague." So getting an invitation to ride along with one was difficult. But on the mild morning of June 26, 2013, I'm aboard Captain Greg Walinski's 35-foot Alicia Ann out of Chatham, Massachusetts. What can he be thinking of to let me watch as he and his deckhand, Darren Vlacich, slaughter some 850 sharks (spiny dogfish), slicing off their tails for the Asian shark-fin-soup market and saving the carcasses to sell locally as "rock salmon" (because what American wants to eat dog?) and to the Brits for fish-and-chips. Sharks and shark gore, reeking of urea, accumulate on the deck well above boot level. An environmental outrage guaranteed to incite Audubon readers, right?

Precisely the opposite. When longlining is done this way and in this kind of water, it's the most selective and environmentally friendly of all commercial fishing. Gillnets pile up bycatch (a minimum of 400,000 dead seabirds a year, according to a study in the June 2013 issue of Biological Conservation). Trawl nets, dragged through the mid-depths or along the ocean floor, sweep up entire fish communities. Otter trawls, which rake the bottom, do the same even as they clearcut forests of fish-sustaining coral, sea fans, and vegetation. Walinski and his fellow dogfish longliners don't kill bycatch and don't destroy habitat. Because of this selectivity they are exempt from the rule requiring trawlers and gillnetters to videotape their fishing or have an observer aboard.

Dogfish are vulnerable because they bear live young in dog-sized litters, but the current quota is sustainable. "They're about the only thing we have left," says Walinski. At the town fish pier I'd seen bumper stickers that read: "Na- tional [Marine] Fisheries Service: DESTROYING Fishermen and Their Communities Since 1976." The agency is guilty as charged--but not, as most Yankee fishermen imagine, because of strictness. Until 2006, when Congress outlawed killing marine fish faster than they can reproduce, the NMFS had trouble saying one of the kindest words a regulator or parent can utter: No.

Walinski isn't imbued with this kind of bitterness; he's full of good humor, a survivor, an adapter. For example, today for the first time he's slicing off the valuable tails, in the process draining the pungent, meat-degrading blood, then putting the carcasses on ice. This way he'll potentially get 50 cents per pound instead of 15. Dogfish tastes great, he says. He likes it deep-fried or baked with tomato sauce.

Walinski doesn't come from a fishing family; he got into the business 30 years ago because he loves the sea and everything that lives in it. He throttles down and grins as a dozen humpback whales roll, gape, and blow circles of bubbles to corral a shoal of sand eels. Later he slows again as great and sooty shearwaters dive and dash across the water, snatching sand eels pushed to the surface by charging striped bass. These shearwaters can swim underwater, occasionally chasing longline bait, but they're almost never able to open their beaks wide enough to get hooked. With other types of longlining, shearwaters, such as the Cory's, Balearic, and yelkouan, are not so lucky.

Deckhand Vlacich is made of the same stuff as Walinski. Later in the day he points out a fresh slick with Wilson's storm-petrels dancing over it. They seem to walk on the water, a talent Saint Peter (from whom they derive their name) is said to have possessed. Whoever came up with the name "petrel" hadn't seen the deep-diving petrels of the Southern Hemisphere that bring longline baits to the surface.

Most slicks off Cape Cod are natural, resulting from oil from baitfish chopped up by bass or bluefish, but here there is no sign of either. Vlacich theorizes that one of the local great white sharks has just eaten a seal and we're seeing its oil. Recently he saw a herring gull sitting on a seal's head; when he got closer he noticed that everything aft of the front flippers was missing.

Each time fish marks show on the sonar, Vlacich flips his fishing reel into free-spool and drops a hook baited with herring. It's not worth setting a longline unless you first catch a dogfish to make sure the sonar hasn't shown you some other species. In six hours he lands only a cod. The cold spring has kept the dogs out of inshore waters. "Let's call it a day," murmurs Walinski. But five minutes later the fisherman in him takes over, and he asks what my schedule is.



When the third set is in we have our daily quota of 4,000 pounds--without killing or even catching another species.


But other longliners can face daunting challenges. The last thing they want is to waste hooks and fishing time on non-targets, so they're apt to be receptive to mitigation methods. "We try to extract ideas from fishermen and sometimes move those ideas in different directions, working with them on their boats," Melvin says. "We get them involved in a problem-solving process. I really wanted to zero in on streamers, fine-tuning the design to make it more effective. Off South Africa there were several albatross species we were concerned about. They couldn't reach the bait, but white-chinned petrels would bring it up and get mobbed by the albatrosses, which would then get hooked and drown."




Black-footed and Laysan albatrosses fly from Hawaii to Southern California to gorge on spawning squid that pack in around the Channel Islands. Now much of this critical feeding area is off-limits to squid fishermen because it's part of a 318-square-mile network of "marine protected areas," established under California's Marine Life Protection Act of 1999. "Ten percent of U.S. land is protected, and less than one percent of the ocean," declares Mike Sutton, director of Audubon California. "We figured it was time to change that."

The world's largest marine protected area--the 140,000-square-mile Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument, established by President George W. Bush in 2006--has significantly reduced bycatch of birds, turtles, and fish by excluding all commercial fishermen (foreign vessels included), of which the majority were longliners. And the 10 islands protected by the monument are vital breeding habitat for albatrosses.


Even if humans are able to reverse global warming, it will take time that imperiled seabirds don't have. But as the United States has demonstrated, stopping longline bycatch is something that can be done in months. Congress now needs to take us the final distance and, as Mike Daulton observes, bring other countries up to our standards by joining ACAP.

Speak Up!



PEW Charitable Trusts at:

The Billfish Foundation; Shark Advocates International

Towing the Line. Sharks Photograph by Brian Skerry/National Geographic Stock Fishing Failures










Towing the Line. Turtles Photograph by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Creative Turtle Troubles

What works as mitigation for one class of bycatch may harm another. Anchors reduce bird bycatch by taking bait quickly to the bottom. But when they hold it there they increase lethal bycatch of sea turtles, especially loggerheads that eat longline bait and are then held underwater until they drown. Other sea turtles, especially leatherbacks, tangle or get snagged in unanchored pelagic longlines, but if the lines aren't too deep, at least they can make it to the surface to breathe.

The U.S. fleet kills a lot of turtles, but nothing compared with foreign fleets. Some of the worst offenders are Spain, Japan, China, Ecuador, Peru, and Canada. Canada's Atlantic swordfish longliners annually catch, injure, or kill something like 1,200 loggerheads and at least a hundred leatherbacks. There are no bycatch caps, and no restrictions on area, bait, depth, or time bait stays in the water. And only about 5 percent of the boats have government observers.


In the Pacific, loggerhead and leatherback populations are much smaller and in even steeper decline. So the NMFS prohibits West Coast-based swordfish longliners from the North Pacific high seas. And it requires shallow-water pelagic longliners based in Hawaii to carry a NMFS observer so the agency can shut down fishing when an annual cap of 34 loggerheads or 26 leatherbacks is reached.

"Circle hooks" (rounder and with smaller gaps than traditional "J hooks" and no more expensive) are required where the U.S. fleet operates in major turtle habitat. They help because turtles get hooked in the mouth rather than the throat. U.S. longliners have to carry dip nets and line cutters so they can cut the line near the hook, generally enabling turtles to survive. And in much of the North Atlantic they have to use fish instead of squid for bait because turtles tend to nibble the former off the hook and gulp the latter whole.

Most loggerheads die on lines held to the bottom by anchors. The most effective mitigation method for turtle bycatch is "buoy gear," developed for swordfish in the Gulf of Mexico. It also works better--about 300 swordfish caught per 1,000 hooks compared with 8 per 1,000 for longlines. It's catching on because of its efficiency, but it needs to be mandated. About 15 buoys, often illuminated and hanging on baited hooks near the bottom, are deployed from a tethered line at night. When a fish takes the bait the buoy moves, and the fisherman hauls in his catch. Turtle bycatch is virtually nonexistent; non-target fish are released alive; and the quality of the catch is improved because it doesn't die the way it does on longlines.
