In a shocking report released on Thursday, it was revealed that 33 850 seabirds, 4 200 sea turtles and more than seven million sharks are killed every year on the hooks of longline fishing vessels off the west coast of South Africa, Namibia and Angola.
The report was released by Birdlife South Africa and WWF-South Africa, the first time an assessment has been made of the effect of longline fishing on these three vulnerable creatures in the Benguela Current ecosystem.
Most of albatross and sea turtles killed on the fish hooks are listed as threatened species, and many of the shark species are also threatened.
Continues Below ↓
Samantha Petersen, manager of the Birdlife and the WWF Responsible Fisheries Programme, said on Thursday the survey had taken three years and looked at the impact of pelagic longlining, where lines were set close to the ocean surface, and demersal longlining, where lines were set on the bottom of the ocean.
"Turtles, seabirds and sharks all have similar life history characteristics. They grow slowly and breed slowly. The wandering albatross lays one egg every two years, so they don't have the ability to recover, unlike many fish species. They also move over great distances and come into contact with a number of fisheries from many countries, so this is not a problem that one country can solve," she said.
The study area was restricted to the Benguela Current ecosystem from Cape Town north to Angola.
South Africa undertook at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 to implement an ecosystem approach to sea fisheries by 2010. This ensures that an entire marine ecosystem is healthy, rather than only certain commercially exploited fish stocks.
The figures for deaths of seabirds, turtles and sharks represent "an absolute minimum" as there was very little data available from Angola.
Continues...
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
