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Every year, thousands of seabirds and sea turtles die from getting unintentionally netted by fishermen. However, researchers are shining a light on ways to prevent this problem occurring.

Off the coast of Peru in 2011, a two and a half year experiment took place which involved the bycatch of cormorants, a fish-eating bird. Two nets were dropped into the ocean, one with LED lights attached and one without.

At the end of the test period, it was apparent that the LED lights were successful. This is because the net without LEDs had killed 39 cormorants in comparison to the 6 that had died in the LED net.

There was a lot of previous research that indicated LED lights reduced the entanglement of sea turtles in finishing nets. This study was a follow-up to that previous knowledge.

Jeff Mangel, the lead author of the Centre of Ecology and Conservation in Falmouth said ‘When we attached the LED lights to the nets, the catch of sea turtles declined by about 64 per cent.”

“It’s really surprising and we were very positive with that response. And when we looked deeper into the data, we realized it looked like these fisheries were also catching sea birds and it also looked like the sea bird catch declined with the LED nets.”

Mangel is also a part of the University of Exeter which was one of the three organisations involved in the study, the other two being a Peruvian marine conservation NGO called ProDelphinus and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States.

Even though it’s still unknown why the LED lights have deterred birds and turtles from fishing nets, Mangel has expressed how excited at the result that it seemed to reduce the catch when the lights were attached.

It is believed that it could be something as simple as the net being more visible meaning that the birds are more able to see it and avoid it. Or, seeing a light where it’s unexpected may make the bird more cautious to approach it.

“The technology of LED is really developing quickly and the price of lights has really come down a lot since even five or 10 years ago,” Mangel said. “It’s conceivable that you could affordably, even in small-scale fishery settings, equip nets with lights and do that on a large scale.”

The researchers are now hoping to work with larger fisheries to see if the lighting approach can reduce bycatch globally.

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