Improving understanding of seabird bycatch in Scottish longline fisheries and exploring potential solutions

Seabird bycatch of several species, but predominately northern fulmar, has been recorded by fisheries observers working in the UK offshore longline fishery that targets hake in United Kingdom and European Union waters from the Celtic Sea to the northern North Sea. Previous mortality estimates for the fishery (Northridge et al. 2020), using data collected from 2010 – 2018, indicated that total seabird bycatch in the UK offshore longline fishery might be in the region of several thousand individuals per year, but low sampling levels meant that confidence intervals around the estimates were wide and there were significant caveats related to potential biases in the data used in the analyses.