Aquatic Environment and Biodiversity Annual Review 2012

AEBAR 2012: Protected species: Seabirds
Since publication of the NPOA in 2004, more progress has been made in the commercial fishing
sector, including:
• in the deepwater fishing sector;
o industry has implemented vessel specific risk management plans (VMPs) comprising
non-mandatory seabird scaring devices offal management and other measures to
reduce risks to seabirds,
o Government has implemented mandatory measures to reduce risk to seabirds (e.g.,
use and deployment of seabird scaring devices), and
o industry has taken a proactive stance in resourcing a 24/7 liaison officer to undertake
incident response actions, mentoring, VMP and regime development and reviewing,
and fleet wide training;
• in the bottom and surface long-line sectors, Government has implemented mandatory
measures including tori lines, night setting, line weighting and offal management;
• a number of research projects have been or are currently being undertaken by government and
industry into offal discharge, efficacy of seabird scaring devices, line weighting and longline
setting devices; and
• workshops organised by both industry bodies and Southern Seabird Solutions are being held
for the inshore trawl and longline sectors.
Areas still requiring progress identified in MPI’s 2012 consultation documents for a revision to the
NPOA-seabirds included:
• development and implementation of mitigation measures, and education, training and
outreach in commercial set net fisheries and inshore trawl fisheries;
• implementation of spatially and temporally representative at-sea data collection in inshore and
some HMS fisheries;
• development and implementation of mitigation measures for net captures in trawl fisheries;
• development and implementation of mitigation measures, education, training and outreach in,
and risk assessment of non-commercial fisheries (especially setnet and line fisheries).
Mitigation has developed substantially since FAO’s IPOA was published and a number of recent
reviews consider the effectiveness of different methods (Bull 2007, 2009) and summarise currently
accepted best practice (ACAP 2011). In December 2010, FAO held a Technical Consultation where
International Guidelines on bycatch management and reduction of discards were adopted (FAO2010).
The text included an agreement that the guidelines should complement appropriate bycatch measures
addressed in the IPOA-Seabirds and its Best Practice Technical Guidelines (FAO 2009). The
Guidelines were subsequently adopted by FAO in January 2011.
The most important factor influencing contacts between seabirds and trawl warp cables is the
discharge of offal (Wienecke and Robertson 2002; Sullivan et al. 2006, ACAP 2011). Offal
management methods used to reduce the attraction of seabirds to vessels include mealing, mincing,
and batching. ACAP recommends (ACAP 2011) full retention of all waste material where practicable
because this significantly reduced the number of seabirds feeding behind vessels compared with the
discharge of unprocessed fish waste (Abraham 2009; Wienecke and Robertson 2002; Favero et al.
2010) or minced waste (Melvin et al. 2010). Offal management has been found to be a key driver of
seabird bycatch in New Zealand trawl fisheries (Abraham 2007; Abraham and Thompson 2009b;
Abraham et al. 2009; Abraham 2010; Pierre et al 2010, 2012 a&b). Other best practice
recommendations (ACAP 2011) are the use of bird-scaring lines to deter birds from foraging near the
trawl warps, use of snatch blocks to reduce the aerial extent of trawl warps, cleaning fish and benthic
material from nets before shooting, minimising the time the trawl net is on the surface during hauling,
and binding of large meshes in pelagic trawl before shooting.
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