Seabirds and fishing – solutions

I am now well and truly settled in with the Our Far South team who have really made me royally welcomed.  As I write my ribs are still sore from laughter incurred as a result of the ‘Hawaiian evening’ last night. Amazingly they all work as hard as they play and a lot is going on every day and in many different disciplines.

In my last blog I wrote about the threats to seabirds from a number of factors; one of which is fishing.  Here I’ll try and tell you what we have found to be successful in reducing fishing related captures.

This is what it is all about.

Trawling and long-lining are two common methods of commercial fishing that cause problems around New Zealand. There is increasing evidence that methods used by recreational fishers like inshore line fishing and shallow water set netting also cause seabird deaths.  To some extent what we do it is dependent on the type of fishing method but generally the underlying principles are the same.

So how can we stop seabirds being killed as a result of fishing?  The universal principles of hazard management can be applied to this problem as well – isolate, minimise, or eliminate.  Removing the threat is obvious – an example of this the fishmeal plant on San Aotea II meaning that nothing edible goes back over the side.  When using the longlining example (although the principles are relevant to other fishing methods,) isolation and mitigation translate into methods that either scare birds away from the danger zones near vessels that are actively fishing, or moving the attractant food away from these areas, either by changing their location or by the retiming of some operations. The most effective solutions tend to be simultaneous combinations of a number of these different techniques.

The correct positioning of the Streamer line over the
hooks as they are set is most important.

Our main marine version of a scarecrow is the streamer line (also called the tori or bird line).  This is generally a rope of relatively thin diameter (think clothesline,) with a bit of heavy mooring rope or similar at the end to create drag which is towed behind a boat.  The main line is generally quite long – say 200 metres.  Hanging off this, like washing, are a number of paired streamers made of coloured plastic tubing spaced out close enough to be effective and cut so that they reach from the line to the water – the streamer line obviously angles  down to the sea surface from the stern of the boat. When deployed the streamers move about in the wind and scare the birds. The best systems allow this streamer line to be pulled one way or the other across the stern of the vessel in order to sit directly over the line as it is being set as wind and tide can affect this location. ‘Jigglers’ that shake the line physically and the use of an extension pole to one side of the vessel which also creates a ‘wall’ near the area where the baits first enter the water are enhancements. In ice-free waters an arrangement similar to this is used about the hauling area (a curtain) to keep birds away from baited hooks as the line is hauled back up. We also have noise-making devices such as the gas powered cannons used in orchards and vineyards.

The most effective way of reducing seabird mortality, by minimising the danger, is making sure the baited hooks sink quickly out of the diving range of birds.  Weighted lines are the best method – our New Zealand fishing industry has worked closely with suppliers to develop a longline backbone (the rope that the hooks are attached to) with lead weights embedded in it to make it sink quickly. This is now widely used and is a safer and more effective solution than our previous technique of tying larger weights onto the line at intervals.

Timing the release of fish waste and bait is also very important in minimising seabird captures. Although this is not an option south of 60° S due to the CCAMLR regulations on offal discharge, in other fisheries this is a very successful technique. Best carried out from the side of the vessel away from the hauling area and most effectively when no hooks are coming up it means that birds will get their feed in safety.  Some object to this approach on the basis that it will teach birds that vessels fishing are food sources – to my mind we are well past that stage and are better off managing the, by now, well learned behaviour.  Setting lines only at night when visibility is poor is another option, although down here in the Ross Sea in summer this is obviously not an option as it is always light.

To my mind one of the most important factors is the commitment of the skipper and senior crew on each boat to reducing seabird mortality - other crew take their lead from those they respect.

I have seen us make huge progress  in the elimination of seabird catch over the last decade but this does not mean we have solved the problem or can afford to be complacent.  All of us who fish, whether as a business or for pleasure, have a duty to fulfil. It’s a problem we can fix.

Next blog – the Antarctic toothfish.

Seabirds and fishing – challenges

Trevor Hughes (left), long time leader of the Antarctic Policy Unit
 welcomes me ashore at Franklin Island.

Yesterday our San Aotea II finally met up with the Spirit of Enderby and the Our Far South team at Franklin Island. I have now finally joined them (swapped by San Aotea II for half-a-dozen tins of instant coffee and 5 kilos of sugar; a pretty fair trade they thought).  San Aotea II then headed for home, having been away since November 28^th of   last year.  For me, I had the added bonus of finally stepping foot on Antarctica as the team went ashore at Franklin Island – in all the years I have worked here that had never been possible as special permits are required and environmental protection is paramount to protect the birds, seals, and other living things.  Which leads us into the subject of my next two blogs – seabirds and fishing.

South Polar skuas playing on our vessel.

A couple of weeks ago, fishing north of the Ross barrier we had an escort of South Polar skuas circling about the boat.  Over several hours I watched one of these birds make numerous attempts to land on the foredeck.  After finally realising the futility of trying to land on the rail (made of pipe) with webbed feet the bird managed to set down on the deck – not gracefully but successfully.  Having succeeded in this it looked pretty happy, warming its underside on the heated deck and settling in.  This first arrival was followed by a second bird – possibly its mate going through the same procedure until also finally alighting alongside the first.  There was a line with a round ‘monkey’s fist’ (knot) on the end attached to one of the mooring ropes, and this pair of skuas spent a lot of time and energy trying to make off with it. They were tugging and hauling vigorously together, one way or the other for hours, but failing as it was obviously firmly attached.  They might have felt that they had found the ultimate penguin egg.  We had a lot of pleasure watching their antics.  They eventually departed bereft of the prize. Unfortunately not all interactions between seabirds and fishing vessels end as well.

A few facts to start – according to my reading there are about 8600 species of birds of which only 359 species are seabirds.  Of these 359 species, 84 (or nearly a quarter) breed about New Zealand and our off-shore Islands.  Of those 84, 35 species are endemic to the New Zealand region alone.

Although some of these New Zealand seabirds stay within New Zealand waters many travel much more widely – as far as the North Pacific and South Atlantic, returning to New Zealand waters to breed.

Adelie penguin in the surf at Franklin Island.

Without doubt seabird numbers worldwide are under threat. The reasons for this are many: introduced and natural predators, loss of habitat, plastic debris - either harming them through ingestion or entanglement, oil spills or pollution, climate change, and, of importance to us - fishing.  The fishing industry has little or no control over many of these threats but it can make a big difference by reducing or removing the effects of fishing on these seabird populations. This is a problem we must own and solve.

What is the problem?  Simply the fact that birds are attracted to boats as a ready source of food. Bait, fish waste, discarded fish, and lost fish are an easy meal – fast food on the waves.

With ongoing research documenting the threats and continuing demise of seabird populations, answers and solutions are required of the fishing industry world-wide.  New Zealand has been at the forefront of this response. A major player in New Zealand is Southern Seabird Solutions, bringing together government, fishing industry, science, and environmental groups with the common aim of promoting fishing practices that avoid the incidental capture and mortality of seabirds.   I will detail specific methods used aboard our longline vessels in a later blog but in general such methods either scare birds away from dangerous areas around a vessel, remove the attractant food, minimise the time baits are available to birds, or time fishing activities when seabird numbers are low, absent or when their vision is reduced, such as at night.

SouthernSeabird Solutions is a charitable trust and brings together industry, government, and environmental groups to share expertise in addressing this issue and sharing solutions. New Zealand Skipper, John Bennett, the then skipper of San Aotea II was the first recipient of the Golden Albatross Award at the International Fishers Forum held in Hawaii in 2002 for his commitment to eliminate capture of seabirds and his innovation in this regard.

When New Zealand vessels started working in the Ross Sea this knowledge and our methods were transferred into the fishery with many of the innovations and measures used by our vessels now widely incorporated into CCAMLR Conservation measures for not only the Ross Sea region but other exploratory fisheries.  In the fourteen years that New Zealand vessels have fished in the Ross Sea no seabirds have been killed as a result of fishing operations, a record we are proud of.

Next blog Seabirds and fishing – solutions.

CCAMLR 101

It’s a very cold and windy day down here this morning; the temperature is hovering about -9°C or so and it’s a full gale blowing.  Having said that we have been really lucky with the weather for our CCAMLR survey so far and things are proceeding well with over two-thirds of the sampling lines completed.

  An observer monitoring line setting. Two observers must

       be carried aboard all boats working in CCAMLR exploratory

 fisheries as one of the management measures.

It’s pretty hard to boil down a complex organisation such as CCAMLR and its management systems into a few sentences but I’ll try my best.

So what is CCAMLR and what does it have to do with Antarctic Fishing?  The Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (abbreviated as CCAMLR and pronounced ‘kammelar’) came into being in 1980 as part of the Antarctic Treaty System with 15 signatories, New Zealand being a founding member.  There are now 25 Signatories to the Convention and 9 other States that are party to the Convention but not Members of the Commission. This Convention established a Commission to manage the marine living resources for the Antarctic region and applies to all marine living resources except seals and whales.  The Convention applies to the regions south of the Antarctic Convergence, a boundary where colder polar waters meet the more temperate waters to the north and is a very effective biological barrier to most Southern Ocean species.   CCAMLR has met annually since the first meeting in 1982 in October-November at its headquarters in Hobart, Tasmania. There are a number of scientific working groups that advise the Scientific

Committee which in turn advises the Commission.  Most of these groups also meet annually.

Why was the Convention thought necessary?  Well it was because of concerns raised about the potential for a developing krill fishery in the 1970’s to significantly affect the Antarctic ecosystem (which is largely dependent on krill) and a desire to avoid the overexploitation and other problems that had occurred in other fisheries at that time (including several Antarctic fish species that had been overfished).  The main objective of the Convention is the conservation of Antarctic marine living resources, where ‘conservation’ is defined to include rational use (where rational use allows the harvesting of marine species while ensuring that the principles of conservation are maintained).  The principles of rational use are detailed out in Article 2 of the Convention.  In short - CCAMLR’s task is to balance the demands of fisheries with the requirement to ensure the Southern Ocean ecosystem is not negatively affected by those fisheries. CCAMLR was the first international convention involving fisheries to include wide-ranging conservation principles in its objectives based on an ecosystem approach.

CCAMLR’s headquarters in Hobart, Australia.

What is the ecosystem approach?  A management system that focuses not only on the target species fished, but also manages dependent and related species in the ecosystem. How does CCAMLR do this?  Very briefly, by the setting of a long-term annual yield for target species drawing on a number of sources and revising this yield frequently as new information or improved methodologies become available.  This yield figure is based on mathematical models which incorporate the requirement to ensure that sufficient of the catch species are also available for predators.  The calculations are deliberately conservative to account for uncertainty in our knowledge.  Other sources of information such as research surveys (like one San Aotea II is currently undertaking) are incorporated as well as any other relevant fishery independent information.  Fish and non-fish by-catch are also rigorously managed – the protection of these will be the subject of a further blog.

For those interested further the CCAMLR website provides a much more comprehensive explanation of these topics.  I hope that the weather is kinder for our Our Far South crew as they cross the Southern ocean from Macquarie Island to the Ross Sea than it is here today.  I am hoping to transfer aboard sometime midweek.  Next blog – Seabirds and fishing – challenges and solutions.

Our fine vessel

Vessels working in the Antarctic environment are confronted with additional challenges when compared with operations around New Zealand and other lower latitude fisheries.  The obvious ones are the ice and cold.  Additionally there is a strict obligation to keep our environmental footprint as low as possible – that is reducing the impact of our operations on the Antarctic environment to the minimum.  There are also fishing issues such as the minimisation of seabird interactions.

The crew on the San Aotea II

So what makes our vessel, San Aotea II, suited for working in these cold southern waters?  Well she was purpose built in Norway for polar waters, originally for a Russian Company but purchased by Sanford specifically for Antarctic fishing. She has successfully operated in the Ross Sea for the past fourteen seasons. We have a heated foredeck, rail, and warm air running up through the foremast.  This controls the build-up of ice on the forepart of the boat in cold and stormy conditions. The bridge windows have trace-heating wires through them to stop ice accumulation there as well.  We also have good accommodation heating, heating in the stability tank and the factory overboard sumps.  There is an extensive array of ice lights up on the forward mast to assist safe navigation in the hours of darkness which can occur late in the season.  She is built to an ice classification for operation in regions where ice floes of 40cm thickness are anticipated – New Zealand requires its vessels operating in Antarctic waters to be of an ice-strengthened class.
 

We issue good warm protective clothing and carry survival suits for all crew members and observers. In an emergency we have four encapsulated life rafts aboard.  Carried either side of the vessel, each pair can take a total of 45 persons – our full crew complement is 26.  We also have an alloy Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB) with a 50 HP outboard. 

San Aotea II

To reduce seabird interactions San Aotea II is one of very few longliners fitted with a plant which converts all fish waste, unusable by-catch, and bait into dried fish meal.  All garbage is sorted and retained for disposal ashore or burnt depending on type, with the ash being retained for shore based disposal.  All food waste must be finely macerated before discharge.  Eggs and chicken bones, a special case, must be kept aboard due to the risk of infecting wildlife with Salmonella. The factory sumps are fitted with fine screens to prevent any processing waste going over the side.

There are other considerations - remoteness means additional challenges when confronted with potential medical and dental issues and the lack of access to emergency services is always kept in mind. Crew and vessel safety is paramount.

And finally to make it all work we have well-trained and experienced officers and crew, many of whom have spent many seasons working in the Ross Sea – but more on the crew in a coming blog.

Counting fish

An adult and a pre-recruit toothfish.  

The adults can reach over 2 metres in length

 and weigh in excess of 150 kg.

So, why are we way down here by the Ross Ice Shelf as far south as one can possibly fish?  We are now half-way through carrying out a research programme for CCAMLR.  This is a ‘pre-recruit survey’ (scientist-speak for measuring those fish that are too young to spawn) – the pre-teens of the Antarctic toothfish world if you like.  Now just to be clear there are two species of toothfish; Antarctic toothfish, which is what we mainly catch in the Ross Sea region, and Patagonian toothfish, which are largely caught in other fishing areas. Antarctic toothfish live further south and generally grow larger and Patagonian toothfish have a more northern distribution.  Most media coverage on Ross Sea fishing issues incorrectly report the catch as Patagonian toothfish.

Why are we doing this?  The most important reason is to get a handle on what the fishery might be like in a few years’ time.  The Ross Sea fishery is mainly based on adult fish and although we have a really good idea of the sizes (and thus the ages) of these, we know less about the population structure of the smaller fish which will replace them in the years to come.  We know from previous work that the younger and smaller fish hang out here in the shallower water in the southern Ross Sea (the shelf).  So we are fishing 65 different locations in order to collect these younger fish.  We catch them, and then measure many of their characteristics such as their length, weight, sex, and some organ weights - we remove and store their otoliths (to get their ages), and then take tissue samples for a raft of other projects ashore.

Drs Hanchet and Jo discussing the finer points 

of fish identification.  

What do we hope to understand from this work?  Firstly, whether there are differences in the numbers of young fish that survive after hatching from year to year - and if so how much this varies from one year to the next.  We might then then be able to determine what environmental factors influence this success.  It is also an additional insurance policy for the fishery, as this work will give advanced notice as to what we might expect in the adult population a few years down the track.

Who is doing it?  Well we have two scientists aboard – Dr Stu Hanchet from New Zealand (NIWA) who was one of the proponents of the work; and Dr Hyun-Su Jo from Korea’s National Fisheries Research and Development Institute (NFRDI).  There are also two of us from Sanford and our two scientific observers.  All vessels working in CCAMLR Exploratory fisheries like the Ross Sea must carry two observers at all times.  We work 24/7 with three of us on a watch doing the sampling.

Picking up our scientists from Cape Bird.

On 4 February we picked up our scientists from Cape Bird on Ross Island after we finished our normal season. Thanks to a great break in the weather and the much appreciated assistance and organisation of Antarctica New Zealand‘s Peter McCarthy we got them aboard without difficulty.  Most aboard also got their first view of Ross Island, Mt Erebus and Mt Terror as we rarely get close to the continent during normal operations.  I really hope the rest of our Our Far South crew get a similar day when they get down here.

Next blog – our fine vessel.

THE VIEW FROM MY OFFICE

The view of the Ross Ice Shelf
 from the bridge of the San Aotea II.

This is my first (ever) blog so I beg the reader’s indulgence – I’m feeling my way.

As I write this early morning I am having trouble seeing the computer terminal due to bright sunshine.  You learn quickly down here that 24 hours of sunlight comes with a hitch – the sun is always quite low on the horizon – very much like driving a car just after sunrise in the winter.  On fine days the glare is more hindrance than asset.   Looking out the bridge windows now I can see the Ross Ice Shelf (also known as the Ross Barrier) framed by a pale blue cloudless sky and stretching in front of me right across the horizon from east to west.  I sometimes wonder what James Clark Ross must've thought when he first came up against it in 1841 – it's nearly 50 metres high and stretches east 455 nautical miles from Cape Crozier on Ross Island, completely blocking his further progress south.  You cannot go further south than here by sea. As I look it’s a dazzling white ribbon with the sun contrasting and shadowing all the irregularities - caves, crannies, and bulges. The Ross Ice Shelf is where many of the southern hemisphere bergs are calved and out to starboard there is a new berg about four miles long. Flat-topped and pristine white it’s the definitive and unique southern hemisphere tabular berg – and I’ve got a great view of it from my ‘office’.

Me (left) and Peter Weeks the skipper of the Aotea II.
That's Mt Erebus in the background.

So, who am I and why am I writing this?   When asked, I define myself a marine science specialist -having spent much of the last forty-one years working at sea.  I worked for Government agencies for just over 20 years in the disciplines of fishing gear technology, exploratory fishing,  and then running research surveys mainly for stock assessment. Then I changed tack in the early 1990’s and spent a number of years as a fillet- boat processing manager for Sanford and moving to a diverse range of fishing related work .

Now I’ve come full circle and am again taking up some research work as an independent consultancy – mainly this time on Antarctic fisheries .  This started in the Ross Sea where I have spent every summer since early 2001 contracting to Sanford. Among other things I supervised the research carried out aboard.  The scope then widened to encompass the South Atlantic fisheries at South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Over the past seven years I have attended annual CCAMLR Meetings as a member of the Fish Stocks Working Group and as an advisor to the New Zealand delegation to the Scientific Committee. I have written or co-authored a number of scientific papers chiefly on Antarctic toothfish biology, feeding, sea-bird mortality mitigation, and the long-line fishing methods used in Antarctic fisheries.

I feel very privileged to be able to take part in the Our Far South voyage. For those of you who don't know, it's a project where a group of New Zealanders from a wide range of backgrounds travel together to Antarctica and the sub Antarctic Islands to investigate the issues facing the region. Due to commitments and timing I will join them when they get down here in about a week and a half depending on weather.

Where am I?  Aboard San Aotea II - one of Sanford’s longline vessels in the Ross Sea carrying out a research survey on small toothfish at the very south of the Ross Sea.  More on the survey, CCAMLR and the boat next few blogs.