Bycatch News
I sat down to talk about the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction's work with Andrew Lewin, who founded Speak Up for Blue, a website dedicated to communicating about ocean conservation.
Do circle hooks reduce bycatch?...It depends.
Last week, NOAA hosted over 160 marine scientists, fisheries managers, gear experts, and commercial and recreational fishermen, from 20 countries, in Coral Gables, FL, for the first international symposium on circle hooks in research, management and conservation. While we all came away more informed about circle hooks, we left with more questions about their effectiveness for catching target species and reducing bycatch.
On Monday, June 27, I took the Casco Bay Ferry in Portland to Long Island Maine with Heather Tetreault and Sarah Paquette from the Maine Lobstermen's Association and Kate Dawson from Maine Sea Grant to meet with local lobstermen and women as part of our project to document lobster fishing practices in Maine. We were lucky to be traveling through the picturesque southern Maine islands on one of the most beautiful days of the summer so far.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) determined that the scalloped hammerhead shark (Sphyrna lewini), an Atlantic highly migratory species (HMS), is overfished (NOAA 04/28/2011).
Report documents the range of lobster fishing methods in the Gulf of Maine for the first time
Workshop report from the 19th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals
Over 50 fishermen, whale scientists, fishing gear engineers, rope manufacturers, and marine wildlife disentanglement experts participated in a workshop to examine the dynamics of large whale entanglements in fishing gear.
The Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction was recently featured in an August 27, 2011 editorial in the Boston Globe, "Saving Millions of Fish".
In October 2013, researchers and fishermen from the United States, Europe, South America, Australia, and the Indian Ocean came together to identify reseach priorities for marine mammal bycatch mitigation techniques in longline fisheries.