Looking up for Southern Ocean birds

Forest and Bird, Volume 23, Issue 1, 1 February 1992, Page 6

Looking up for Southern Ocean birds

Barry Weeber

BIRD PROTECTION in Antarctic waters was given a major boost at the 1991 meeting of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) held in Hobart last October. The international convention manages marine resources south of the Antarctic Convergence including all areas south of the 60th parallel. After reports of thousands

of seabirds being killed by net monitor cables around New Zealand and Kerguelen Isfands in the Southern Ocean, the meeting agreed to ban these devices from 1 July 1994. Soviet trawlers are the only vessels still using these cables. Until then the Soviet fleet will be required to use modified techniques to reduce bird mortality and report annually on moves to remove net monitor cables on their fleet of 100 vessels in the Southern Ocean. A major disappointment of the meeting was the failure to close the Patagonian toothfish fishery around South Georgia. Evidence presented to the meeting by Greenpeace and the British Antarctic Survey showed that long line vessels were incidentally killing over a thousand sea birds a year, most of them albatrosses. As an interim measure the meeting agreed to require longline fishing vessels to carry "tori" poles — streamers extending behind the vessel — to deter birds diving for baited hooks. Additional measures are likely to be looked at next year to reduce bird deaths. Progress was also made on fisheries conservation. The meeting agreed to close most of the finfish fisheries in the seas around South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula for the next year. This should allow many of these depleted fisheries to start rebuilding. It also established a precautionary limit on krill fishing around South Georgia and the Antarctic. Although the limit is well above the current catch, it is the first time CCAMLR has set such a cap on Antarctic fishing and is a major step forward for Antarctic marine conservation. At last CCAMLR is beginning to take a realistic approach to the past over-

fishing by Soviet vessels in the Southern Ocean.