25 Sep 2019
At the end of last month, the Chilean
Government took a vital and welcome step towards saving thousands of seabirds
from being needlessly killed in their trawl fisheries by introducing new
regulations making the use of mitigation measures mandatory.
New regulations introduced by the
Chilean Government at the end of August will require a number of important
trawl fleets to implement measures that reduce the bycatch of seabirds. This
includes not only the use bird-scaring lines, which keep birds away from the
trawl cables that can break their wings and kill them, but also other measures,
including ‘snatch blocks’ to reduce the risk of albatrosses colliding with the
net monitoring cable, and limits to the discarding of offal, which attracts
birds to fishing vessels in the first place.
These regulations are the culmination
of over a decade of work from our Albatross
Task Force (ATF) team in Chile, who have worked alongside fishers, researchers
and the national observer programmes of the Chilean Fisheries Development
Institute (IFOP) and the Undersecretariat
of Fisheries (SUBPESCA) to draw attention to the issue of seabird
bycatch by testing and demonstrating the simple ways that these unnecessary
deaths can be avoided.
“The announcement of these new
regulations is wonderful news for the many albatrosses and petrels that use the
seas around Chile to find food for themselves and their chicks,” Cristián
Suazo, leader of ATF-Chile says. “This includes birds that breed both in our
remote southern colonies and on the other side of the Pacific in New Zealand.”
No comments:
Post a Comment