On 13 June 2015 Rob Hyson photographed an adult Shy Albatross Thalassarche cauta with at least a metre of fishing line bearing a weight dangling from its bill while participating in an ocean-going trip organized by Sydney Pelagics & Nature Watching Tours out of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

A Shy Albatross flies with a trailing fishing line, photograph by Rob Hyson

It seems likely that the bird had ingested a longline hook, probably during line hauling, and had then been cut loose as it came aboard the fishing vessel.  Albatrosses of several species with ingested or embedded hooks have been seen from time to time at their breeding sites but it is rare to spot – and then photograph – one in flight at sea.

Widespread adoption of the best-practice mitigation measures of deploying bird-scaring lines, adequate line weighting and night setting, as advocated by ACAP, will greatly reduce the mortality of albatrosses from both pelagic and demersal longline fishing.

Click here for the trip report for 13 June.

With thanks to Rob Hyson for information and photographs.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 25 August 2015

The Vulnerable Pink-footed Shearwater Puffinus creatopus is a recently listed ACAP species.  A breeding endemic to Chile it migrates to the northern hemisphere – as far as Canadian waters - after breeding.  Over recent years the species’ trans-equatorial migration route along the eastern Pacific seaboard has been studied by use of transmitters.

Solar-powered satellite transmitters were again placed on Pink-footed Shearwaters in April this year on Isla Mocha in Chile.  Currently, there are three birds with transmitters near the USA-Canada border in Washington State, three off southern California, two in Baja, Mexico, and two off Peru (click here for updates).

Pink-footed Shearwater migration routes covered to date

Pink-footed Shearwater, photograph by Peter Hodum

Click here for an earlier posting on the shearwater's migration.

The tracking study is a project of the U.S. Geological Survey and Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge.

Selected Literature:

Commission for Environmental Cooperation 2005.  North American Conservation Action Plan: Pink-footed Shearwater.  Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.  vii + 49 pp.

Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada 2004.  COSEWIC Assessment and Status Report on the Pink-footed Shearwater.  Ottawa: Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.  vii + 22 pp.

Environment Canada, 2008.  Recovery Strategy for the Short-tailed Albatross (Phoebastria albatrus) and the Pink-footed Shearwater (Puffinus creatopus) in Canada.  Ottawa: Environment Canada.  vii + 44 pp.

Hinojosa, S.A. & Hodum, P.J. 2008.  Plan nacional para la conservación de la fardela de vientre blanco Puffinus creatopus Coues, 1864 en Chile.  Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF) and Comisión Nacional del Medio Ambiente (CONAMA), Chile.  34 pp.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 24 August 2015

An international workshop on Marine Important Bird Areas in Malta and the Mediterranean will be held over 23 – 25 November 2015 organized by the LIFE+ Malta Seabird Project and BirdLife International  in the Hotel Ta’ Cenc, Gozo, Malta.  The workshop is described as being “a key opportunity to gather knowledge and experience on protecting seabirds across national boundaries and international waters of the Mediterranean as well as set the way forward for international collaborations in protecting our common seabird heritage.”

“Within the Mediterranean seabirds face threats both on land and at sea, such as overfishing, by-catch, invasive predators, habitat destruction from poor planning and marine pollution. However only 4% of the Mediterranean is currently protected through the EU Natura 2000 network in Europe and the Barcelona Convention’s Specially Protected Areas of Mediterranean Importance.  At a regional scale there are still many important gaps to fill in the protected area network for seabirds, particularly for sites at sea. The meeting will enable scientists, nature conservationists and policy makers to further coordinate efforts for seabird protection at a regional scale through capacity building and the sharing of specialist knowledge.

The meeting will start with the presentation of a draft inventory of Marine Important Bird Areas for seabirds in Maltese and international waters identified under the LIFE+ Malta Seabird Project.  This will be followed by sessions on knowledge sharing and gap analysis for the entire Mediterranean region, identifying sites within and beyond national jurisdiction, priority areas and policy mechanisms from across the Mediterranean.”

Click here to read more about the workshop, including the meeting agenda and registration details.

Yelkouan Shearwaters at sea

Malta supports breeding populations of both Yelkouan Puffinus yelkouan and Scopoli’s Calonectris diomedea Shearwaters.  The ACAP-listed Balearic Shearwater P. mauretanicus also breeds within the Mediterranean.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 23 August 2015

SeabirderSaturday will once again have a themed forum discussion.  Today Jennifer Provencher (Department of Biology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada) will be leading the discussion on seabird and marine litter interactions (click here).  To join the discussion, or just learn more about litter and seabirds, join us on Twitter at 1700 - 1900 GMT, and follower #SeabirderSaturday and Jennifer at @jenni_pro.

The discussion is introduced:

“As global travellers seabirds are considered important sentinel species of the world’s oceans.  While seabirds are primarily in search of food, increasingly marine birds are also ingesting, getting tangled and incorporating into their nests plastics and other marine debris.  Although man-made marine debris has likely been entering the oceans for centuries, plastic, the largest component of marine litter, was initially invented in the early 1900s.   By 1988, 30 million tons of plastic was produced annually, with this amount increasing almost 10 fold over since that timae. Interactions between seabirds and marine plastic were first reported in the 1960s, with reports increasing since this time.

Although reports of litter ingestion was first reported [sic] in the 1960s, efforts to standardize, track and monitor the marine debris ingestion by seabirds was pioneered in the North Sea by the ‘Save the North Sea’ group in the early 1990s.  While some data series on marine debris ingestion date back to the 1980s, most regions began this phenomenon in the early 2000s.  Although initial concerns with marine debris ingestion centred around the physical impacts of ingested debris more recently studies have shown that plastics may also be a vehicle for chemicals, including environmental contaminants shown to have deleterious effects on wildlife.  Less work has been done on entanglement and nest incorporation but both have been shown to have negative impacts on seabirds.  UNEP has listed marine plastics as an emerging global environmental challenge.  Given that seabirds have been shown to be an important group for both environmental monitoring and assessing the impacts of plastics debris on wildlife, seabird research can play a critical role in helping to address and understand this global environmental problem."

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Black-footed Albatross entangled with a balloon

Laysan Albatrosses can ingest floating plastic artefacts, photograph by Ross Wanless

"Some discussion topics:

1. What are the best practices for monitoring and assessing debris ingestion in seabirds worldwide given the variety of: a) seabird foraging strategies, and thus ingestion rates; b) retention of debris; c) methods of bird collections available; and d) method of assessing plastic interactions?
2. What effects are ghost nets having on seabird populations globally?
3. How do we best assess the impacts of debris on seabirds, both physically and chemically?
4. What is the fate of ‘bio’ plastics in the environment and the digestive system of seabirds? Does it break down?
5. What long terms studies are available for debris interactions, and what do they tell us?
6. What are the emerging questions about plastics that seabird researchers should focus on?
7. How do we take information collected to better make population level assessments?
8. What geographical areas are lacking in data and coordinated efforts that should be focused on?
9. How do we incorporate plastics at sea data into spatial modelling of seabird threats?
10. Are regional assessments or summaries of plastic interactions useful to science? To policy makers?
11. What form should marine litter data be presented in to be the most useful to policy makers?”

Selected Literature:

Bond, A.L., Montevecchi, W.A., Guse, N., Regular, P.M., Garthe, S. & Rail, J.F. 2012.  Prevalence and composition of fishing gear debris in the nests of northern gannets (Morus bassanus) are related to fishing effort.  Marine Pollution Bulletin 64: 907-911.

Bond, A.L., Provencher, J.F., Elliot, R., Ryan, P.C., Rowe, S., Jones, I.L., Robertson, G. & Wilhelm, S. 2013.  Ingestion of plastic marine debris by common and thick-billed murres in the Northwest Atlantic from 1985 to 2012.  Marine Pollution Bulletin 77: 192-195.

Cadee, G.C. 2002.  Seabirds and floating plastic debris.  Marine Pollution Bulletin 44: 1294-1295.

Good, T.P., June, J.A., Etnier, M.A. & Broadhurst, G. 2010.  Derelict fishing nets in Puget Sound and the Northwest Straits: patterns and threats to marine fauna.  Marine Pollution Bulletin 60: 39-50.

Kühn, S., Bravo Rebolledo, E.L. & van Franeker, J.A. 2015.  Deleterious effects of litter on marine life.  In: Bergmann, M., Gutow, L. & Klages, M. (Eds).  Marine Anthropogenic Litter.  Cham: Springer International.  pp. 75-116.

Provencher, J.F., Bond, A.L. & Mallory, M.L. 2015.  Marine birds and plastic debris in  Canada: a national synthesis and a way forward.  Environmental Reviews 23: 1-13.

Ryan, P.G. 2008.  Seabirds indicate changes in the composition of plastic litter in the Atlantic and south-western Indian Oceans.  Marine Pollution Bulletin 56: 1406-1409.

Ryan, P.G. 2015.  A brief history of marine litter research.  In:  Bergmann, M., Gutow, L. & Klages, M. (Eds).  Marine Anthropogenic Litter.  New York: Springer International. pp. 1-25.

Ryan, P.G., Moore, C.J., van Franeker, J.A. & Moloney, C.L. 2009.  Monitoring the abundance of plastic debris in the marine environment.  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 364: 1999-2012.

van Franeker, J.A., Blaize, C., Danielsen, J., Fairclough, K., Gollan, J., Guse, N., Hansen, P.L., Heubeck, M., Jensen, J.K., Le Guillou, G., Olsen, B., Olsen, K.O., Pedersen, J., Stienen, E.W.M. & Turner, D.M. 2011.  Monitoring plastic ingestion by the northern fulmar Fulmarus glacialis in the North Sea.  Environmental Pollution 159: 2609-2615.

Vegter, A.C., Barletta, M., Beck, C., Borrero, J., Burton, H., Campbell, M.L., Eriksen, M., Eriksson, C., Estrades, A., Gilardi, K., Hardesty, B.D., Ivar do Sul, J.A., Lavers, J.L., Lazar, B., Lebreton, L., Nichols, W.J., Ribic, C.A., Ryan, P.G., Schuyler, Q.A., Smith, S.D.A., Takada, H., Townsend, K.A., Wabnitz, C.C.C., Wilcox, C., Young, L. & Hamann, M. 2014.  Global research priorities for the management and mitigation of plastic pollution on marine wildlife.  Endangered Species Research 25: 225-247.

Yamashita, R., Takada, H., Fukuwaka, M.A. & Watanuki, Y. 2011.  Physical and chemical effects of ingested plastic debris on short-tailed shearwaters, Puffinus tenuirostris, in the North Pacific Ocean.  Marine Pollution Bulletin 62: 2845-2849.

John Cooper, ACAP Information officer, 22 August 2015