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Albatross
| Date: |
30 July 2006 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Hein Ungerer
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
The albatross ... Few people ever get to see these magnificent birds in real life. They spend virtually their entire lives out on the open ocean.
Some of these birds live for 60 years or more and, if everything works in their favour, albatross parents raise one chick every two years.
There are 20 species of albatrosses, 14 of which visit South African waters. They live off our southern coasts but they never come ashore and they only breed on a few isolated islands - all remote and peaceful and cold.
But these majestic birds, some with wingspans of up to three and a half metres, are in trouble.
Peter Ryan (Percy Fitzpatrick Institute): 'Of the twenty odd species I think that eighteen are listed as threatened and two as near-threatened. Of the ones that occur in our waters, every single one is either vulnerable, endangered or critical. It's really quite depressing.'
Peter Ryan is a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town and his research speciality is seabird ecology and conservation. He receives an endless supply of dead albatrosses with hooks in them, all victims of the planet's ever growing fishing industries.
Long-lining involves setting hooks on a line that stretches many kilometres into the sea. And the birds get killed when they dive and take the baited hooks while the line is being laid.
They get dragged underwater and drown.
Each year more than a billion hooks are set by the world's long-line fleets, killing - by some estimates - at least 300 000 seabirds. This figure includes a hundred thousand albatrosses.
And now adding to the long-line crisis, new research has shown that trawlers too are a significant threat to the birds.
Peter: 'They come in to land on the water with their wings spread, and the wing catches the wire of the trawl, and then the force of the water moving across the wire just drags them slowly under water - and it's the most horrendous thing to see because you can see this bird sort of just slowly disappearing under water and they can't do anything to get free.'
John Webb (Carte Blanche presenter): 'Understanding the problem requires a high degree of research, and researching a bird that never lands on South African soil is no easy task. And attaching a satellite transmitter to the back of an albatross has its own unique set of problems. You have to go to where the birds are, beyond a harbour like this one and into the open sea.'
It's important to know where the birds go and how they interact with fishing vessels. The less time they spend with vessels the less chance there is they will get killed. So the albatrosses are fitted with a satellite tracking device which the researchers hope will stay functioning on the bird's back long enough to provide enough data to track its movements.
Samantha Petersen (Birdlife South Africa): 'What is really important for us to understand here in South African waters is how they are interacting with fishing fleets; so how much time are they spending foraging naturally and how much time are they actually spending around fishing boats.'
Samantha Petersen runs the Southern African chapter of the BirdLife International Save the Albatross Campaign. She works closely with the South African fishing industry, educating them about the albatross problem.
Samantha: 'We spend a lot of time at sea to really get to grips with what it is like to be a fisherman; how do the fishing operations work; how can we make sure that these measures are effective, and that they don't affect fishing operations.'
John: 'For years seabird by-catch was a problem only associated with the long-line method of fishing, but more recent studies have shown that it's also an issue on trawlers like these.'
Barry Rose is the Resource Manager for I&J. They've been working closely with BirdLife South Africa and funded the first year of research.
Barry Rose (Resource Manager I&J): 'Samantha Petersen did her first trip on one of our trawlers - this one in fact, spent six days at sea and on return said she didn't think there was such a problem. She had not observed a mortality and interactions were pretty low. Unfortunately subsequent trips showed us that there was a problem.'
And this is what the subsequent trips showed... Although there are many more misses than hits, this footage confirms that birds are being injured and killed.
Faced with this reality, the South African trawling industry funded a second year of research and then introduced compulsory measures to limit seabird deaths on all their ships from July this year.
Barry: 'We tried a number of different things but came back to the tori-line. The tori-line is cheap, easy, safe and reduces mortality in some cases to zero, but overall I think the scientists claim about 90%.'
This was our cue to go out to sea to take a look at a tori-line, more or less from a seabird's perspective.
John: 'On trawlers, most seabirds are killed by the area of line between the stern and the surface of the water. This I&J vessel has already been fitted with the tori-line and, as you can see by the absence of the birds, it's pretty effective.'
Tori-lines scare birds and that makes them stay away from the danger area. Compare this trawler flying the lines with virtually no birds around it, with this one that does not have a tori-line deployed. There are hundreds of birds all running the risk of flying into a cable and being dragged under.
John: 'Barry why are birds drawn to trawlers in the first place?'
Barry: 'Any fishing operation will end up with having some form of waste, where a certain amount of head and gut goes overboard, and it's a free meal for the birds.'
Long-liners too can fairly easily avoid killing birds - if they adhere to some simple rules. The main aim is to stop the birds from getting hold of a baited hook.
Samantha: 'Albatrosses aren't particularly good divers. So if you can get the line to sink as quickly as possible, then you reduce the time that the baited hook is within reach of the birds. And so for the time that it is in the reach of the birds, you use a bird scaring line or a tori-line, to keep the birds away.'
There are also other measures that will keep birds away from the hooks - like discharging offal from the boat when there are no baited hooks going into the water. Also fishing at night stops the deaths. Many seabirds, including albatrosses, are less active at night.
Samantha: 'But at the end of the day birds are being killed out there and it does come down to a willing skipper on every boat, to implement all these solutions.'
One of these willing skippers is Rob Giddey, a man who operates several tuna long-liners. He applies measures to limit seabird by-catch on his boats and his skippers have all attended training courses with Samantha.
Rob Giddey (Tuna Fisheries Operator): 'It costs us a lot of money to go to sea - we're talking in the vicinity of a couple of hundred thousand rand for a 10-day trip, so every hook we put in the water we would like to catch a fish that we can sell. Every bird that eats a piece of bait off the hook is fish that we can't catch.'
But what is it that's so special about the albatross? Why should we care about their well-being?
Peter: 'There's something about albatrosses; they sort of have this iconic status with regards to the open ocean and they have this kind of freedom of the open ocean and this image of albatrosses sailing endlessly across the sea. Be that as it may, I think, you know, irrespective of whether they have any particular value aesthetically or culturally to people, obviously they are worth conserving in their own right just as any other species is.'
It's not an easy life being an albatross. And breeding successfully requires experience and skill - and a reliable partner.
Peter: 'What tends to happen is, the birds come back to the breeding island at an age five, four, five, six and they start hanging out in these sort of teenage hangout places and dance and perform and then slowly, over a couple of years, they will form a partnership with another individual and they might build a nest. And they'll slowly get into sync and then they'll start to breed - and if they're successful, they'll typically retain that partner for many, many breeding attempts. If that partner is lost they will breed with someone else, but that incurs cost because now you've got to start this whole process of finding a sympathetic partner, getting into sync again.'
There is no doubt about it. The fate of the world's albatrosses lies heavily in the hands of the fishing industries. Both the long-lining and trawler industries now have seabird by-catch prevention measures contained in their permit conditions.
Pedro Goosen is the Acting Director for Compliance at Marine and Coastal Management. It's his job to see that the fishing industry complies with those conditions.
Pedro Goosen (Acting Compliance: MCM): 'I think now, with the capacity of our new environmental protection vessels which we didn't have before, that we will meet that goal.'
John: 'Pedro, how many vessels are we monitoring with our coastal patrol boats?'
Pedro: 'Our operational centre is monitoring over a thousand vessels.'
John: 'It sounds like a mammoth task, with only three or four vessels?'
Pedro: 'It is a mammoth task, but we use technology; we use fishing patterns that we get from the scientists, and we use our vessel monitoring system to pinpoint where the boats are so that we're not just sailing blindly in the sea.'
And their impact is being felt by the fishermen ...
Rob: 'The three new coastal patrol vessels of Marine and Coastal Management are quite visible out at sea these days. We see them at sea a lot more regularly than we did in the past when there was absolutely nothing out there.'
Samantha: 'Well seabirds are facing a very real threat of extinction and, without these measures implemented, their future is dire. We have a problem; we have solutions. All we need to do is implement those.'
Peter Ryan warns that if the populations are not stabilised other factors could just tip the balance in this extinction race.
Peter: 'The last thing you need on top of the fishing mortality and maybe the odd predator that's been introduced, now suddenly you get disease into these populations. I'm not particularly pessimistic as long as all we're dealing with is fishing, but if it's fishing and disease and climate change - you know, then it could become a bit more gloomy rather quickly. We'd like to nip it in the bud as soon as possible.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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