Ross Wanless (University of Barcelona – REDUCE)
Abstract
In 1988, Nigel Brothers was invited aboard to help fix a Japanese tuna longline skipper’s “seabird problem”. When he scaled up the dozen-or-so birds caught on that one trip to the global fleet, he inadvertently broke open an entirely new sub-discipline for fisheries. The scale of bycatch, and the scale of its impacts on seabird populations, are still subject to debate almost 40 years later, but what is not in question is that there are few solutions that do work when used correctly. In this talk I will explore why are there not more solutions, and why some seabird populations are still heading towards extinction.
