Albatross Conservation and Chilean Sea Bass

BirdNote^®

Albatross Conservation and Chilean Sea Bass

Written by Bob Sundstrom

This is BirdNote.
[Sounds of a restaurant and a couple ordering dinner]
“Good evening. Are you ready to order?”
“Yes. I’d like the Chilean Sea Bass – but first, could you tell me if it’s from a certified, sustainable fishery?”
The commercial quest for the fish known as Chilean Sea Bass is highly controversial. Each year, the fishery inadvertently kills thousands of marine mammals, sea turtles, and seabirds, among them, the magnificent Wandering Albatross.
 [Boat moving through waves]
Wandering Albatrosses inhabit the waters of the Southern Ocean, along the southern extremes of the continents. Immense, gleaming white seabirds, they possess the longest wingspan of any bird – an amazing twelve feet or more. They arc gracefully for hours over the ocean without a single flap.
But an alarming number of Wandering Albatrosses are killed each year in the commercial quest for Chilean Sea Bass. This type of fishery uses a technique called long-lining. Miles of line and thousands of barbed hooks are set out at once. Fish take the bait – but so do albatrosses – and in so doing are hooked and drowned. And now some albatross species are threatened with extinction. [Wandering Albatross pair calling]
Should we stop buying Chilean Sea Bass entirely? No, not if the fishery uses methods that don’t kill seabirds.  How would you know?  Look for the Marine Stewardship Council’s blue seal of approval. Products that have this blue seal are ecologically sustainable and they deserve our business.
[Wandering Albatross pair calling]
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Call of the Wandering Albatross provided by The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by TA Parker III.
Restaurant and waves recorded by Kessler Productions
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2010 Tune In to Nature.org

ID# WAAL-longlining-01-2010-05-23