Cheap Streamers Could Save

According to Science News reporter S. Milius, a recent , large study conducted by the Washington Sea Grant Program in Seattle (federally funded) has shown that attaching fluttering streamers to the trail lines of desermal longline fishing boats (which trail lines of baited hooks to the depths of such species as cod and halibut) can save seabirds and the US fishing fleet the high costs of accidentally killing endangered species.¹)

Seabirds like the very rare short-tailed albatross are snagged by hooks on trail lines behind fishing boats. They could be saved by streamers trailing from the boat.

In this case, the bird at risk from hooks, besides common seabirds, is the short-tailed albatross whose continued existence hangs on a wing and a prayer. Once the most numerous albatross off our Pacific coast, depredations for plumage at its breeding grounds off Japan, nearly annihilated it. A few hundred now nest on Torishima Island, Japan, and they have recently been sighted again off our coastline, in the northern Pacific, Alaskan waters. Like the Whooping Crane, to lose even a few is a catastrophe and may require federal intervention.