Tests of New Turtle-Friendly Fishing Gear Successful

WASHINGTON, July 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Tests of the winning design from the 2005 Smartgear competition have raised hopes that the fishing gear could be useful for saving turtles across the Pacific. The design by Steve Beverly, a fisherman from New Caledonia, involves attaching weights to long- lines so that baited hooks rest deep enough to catch tuna, the targeted species, but not sea turtles and other non-target species. Long-line fishing gear is standard in certain fisheries and consists of baited hooks hanging from a long drifting line that is suspended from buoys resting on the surface of the water.

With a $50,000 purse, WWF’s annual Smartgear competition awards practical, innovative fishing gear designs that reduce bycatch — the accidental catch and related deaths of marine animals. The deadline for this year’s competition is July 31, 2007. Find out more at http://www.smartgear.org/.

Billions of unwanted animals are caught every year and then discarded dead or dying back into the ocean. Bycatch wastes fishermen’s time and causes hundreds of millions of dollars in damaged gear. It’s also a driving force behind dramatic declines of many marine species.

The tests on Beverly’s design were completed last December as a joint project of the Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, and the University of Hawaii’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Science. The tests showed that Beverly’s design was comparable to conventional methods, raising hopes that it can be widely used throughout the long-line industry without reducing profitability. Researchers concluded that Beverley’s technique “does work and would be practical to incorporate into existing fishing practices in Hawaii’s tuna long-line fleet without jeopardizing the catch rates of bigeye tuna.”

“Steve’s design hits the nail for Smartgear,” said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of World Wildlife Fund. “The goal of the competition is to reduce unnecessary deaths of species like sea turtles while protecting the livelihoods of fishermen. This test shows that his design works, and is a real inspiration to fishermen. We want to see other great designers enter the Smartgear competition.”

Sea turtles generally swim at shallow depths and usually get tangled in or hooked by long-lines at depths of 100 meters (328 feet) or less. Bigeye tunas, the preferred tunas for many Pacific long-line fishing operations, swim at much lower depths. Beverly’s idea is to set long-lines with baited hooks deeper than 100 meters which allows long-line fishermen to minimize encounters with sea turtles while maximizing their tuna catch.

Many thousands of endangered loggerhead and leatherback turtles are incidentally caught in commercial fisheries each year. This bycatch is a significant problem in many fisheries, including long-line fisheries for tuna, swordfish and other species. This is especially true in the eastern Pacific, where leatherbacks have declined more than 90 per cent in the last 20 years. Just 2,000 nesting female leatherbacks exist today compared to 90,000 in the 1980′s.

In 2005, the Smartgear judges voted unanimously to award Mr. Beverly the grand prize because the idea is simple, inexpensive, relies on basic ecological research, and modifies existing gear so fishermen will not have to buy or be trained on complicated new gear.

   Notes   — Visit http://www.smartgear.org/ to learn more about the competition.   — Completed entries for this year’s competition must be submitted by      July 31, 2007.   — One $30,000 grand prize will be awarded and two $10,000 runner-up      prizes will go to the designs judged to be the most practical, cost-      effective methods for reducing bycatch of any species.   — The competition is open to eligible entrants from any background,      including fishermen, professional gear manufacturers, teachers,      students, engineers, scientists and backyard inventors.   — B-roll video and photographs are available upon request.   — Leatherback turtles grow larger, dive deeper, live longer and migrate      farther than most other turtles. They often reach 6 feet in length and      weigh more than 1,000 pounds. The largest leatherback ever recorded was      a male found stranded on a beach in Wales in 1988 at over 8 feet long      and weighing 2,019 pounds.  Leatherbacks live 30-80 years and reach      sexual maturity at approximately 40 years of age.   — Leatherbacks nest on both sides of the Pacific in two populations.      Eastern Pacific leatherbacks that nest in Mexico and Costa Rica have      been found to migrate down along South America as far as Chile, and      western Pacific leatherbacks that nest in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea,      the Solomon Islands and Malaysia have been found to migrate from      Southeast Asia across the Pacific to the waters off the United States      and Mexico.  

World Wildlife Fund

CONTACT: Tom Lalley of World Wildlife Fund, +1-202-778-9544,tom.lalley@wwfus.org

Web site: http://www.worldwildlife.org/