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The Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction supports collaborative research between scientists and the fishing industry to identify practical bycatch reduction solutions for endangered species.  Species groups covered include seabirds, marine mammals, turtles and fish.

The Consortium's focus is in three primary areas:
Understanding interactions between threatened non-target species and fishing operations,
Research and development of bycatch reduction approaches, and
Facilitating global exchange of information on bycatch reduction techniques.

The consortium's searchable database is a source for references and summaries from bycatch reduction studies, as well as descriptions of bycatch mitigation techniques.  It includes:

Citations for studies that pertain to bycatch reduction approaches,
Summaries of the findings for each study,
Descriptions of bycatch reduction techniques,
Descriptions of fishing methods, and
Links to studies and study authors, where available.

Users can search the database by fishing gear, bycatch reduction technique, or non-target wildlife group singly or in combination.  They can also browse the complete list of publications, and arrange them by year and author and suggest articles or field studies to be added to the database.

I tested the data base for longline fisheries and seabirds, searching on "dyed bait" (one of the many mitigation techniques listed) and found six studies listed along with their citations.  I could follow these citations to the papers' abstracts, or in some cases when available open-access to the original document.  A second search on trawl fisheries and seabirds for "any technique" gave me three hits.

Albatrosses gather as a trawl comes aboard
Photograph by Niel Anders

The consortium's web site hosts recent issues of the Bycatch Communication Network Newsletter which was produced for five years until last year.  The final issue for March/April 2011 contains an article on Namibia's demersal longline hake fishery by BirdLife International's Albatross Task Force.  This fishery is estimated to kill an estimated 26 000 birds a year, the majority of which are ACAP-listed albatrosses and petrels: "[s]eabirds interacting with fishing gear are White-Chinned Petrels, Sub-Antarctic Skua, Atlantic Yellow-nosed, Black-browed and Shy Albatrosses that swallow the baited hooks before they sink, become hooked and drown."

The Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction is administered by the New England Aquarium in Boston, USA.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 4 July 2012