Taking advantage of the vastness of the oceans, poachers of the sea fish illegally by disabling their tracking systems. Only the albatross managed to spot them. Attracted by their nets loaded with fish, the bird is an ideal spy to uncover the scale of an activity which represents each year between 8 and 19 billion euros.
It was by studying the excess mortality of albatrosses, a large part of which drowns after swallowing the longline hooks, that the researchers of the “Ocean sentinel” program came up with the idea of geolocating these birds approaching trawlers. They equipped 169 albatrosses with beacons detecting the radars of fishing vessels. Result: more than a third of the approached boats had deactivated their automatic identification system, thus revealing a scale of the plunder of biodiversity.
The “Ocean sentinel” method has already been taken up by teams from New Zealand as well as in Hawaii. A second phase of study, with the deployment of sixty new albatross sea patrol vessels is in preparation.