To Stop Illegal Fishing, Send a Seabird
Illegal fishing is too big a problem for humans to handle alone.
BY CLAUDIA GEIB
October 14, 2022
Every year, as shifting currents pull cold, nutrient-rich waters up from the Pacific Ocean depths, the western coast of South America floods with fish. Billions of anchovies follow the currents in flickering silver masses, and in turn are followed by fleets of fishing vessels.
Conservation scientists follow this catch, too, trying to prevent overharvesting that will cause populations to plummet and jeopardize the many other creatures—larger fish, sea lions, dolphins and sharks, and seabirds—who also depend on the anchovies. This year, these monitors have some unusual assistants: As seabirds flock to the feast, they’ll be carrying GPS-equipped cameras to monitor the ships below.
“They are an independent, non-biased way to record fishing activities,” says Carlos Zavalaga, a seabird ecologist at Peru’s Scientific University of the South, who leads a project that uses kitted-out Peruvian boobies to monitor the country’s anchovy fisheries. “They just go and feed.”
Scientists started sticking gauges and radio trackers on large-bodied animals back in the 1940s, but the advent of GPS, satellite transmission, and miniaturized electronics opened the field up to track smaller, lighter, and farther-traveling animals. Seabirds are stars of this research, and it has yielded extraordinary insight into the lives of creatures capable of drinking seawater, going weeks without food, and of flying halfway around the globe without ever touching land.
More:
https://nautil.us/to-stop-illegal-fishing-send-a-seabird-242630/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks for posting this, Judi Lynn.
Bottom line: why are humans over-fishing and in the long-term, destroying future food sources?
Of course, people need protein but why is that need increasing?
I risk sounding like a broken record on too many posts by sounding the alarm of over-population. It's not a popular cause with most folks. My apologies.
