© Mark Jobling / Wikimedia CommonsWandering albatrosses like this one are critically endangered, partly as a result of getting snagged on fishing lines, but a new scheme is changing that.
Gaudy strips of pink fluorescent tubing are helping to save albatrosses from extinction. They frighten the birds away from baited hooks on fishing lines, which attract, snag and drown some 100,000 albatrosses and petrels a year.
In South African waters in 2008, 85% fewer albatrosses died this way than a year earlier, thanks to the introduction of the pink strips on vessels fishing there for tuna and swordfish.
Flapping in the wind, the strips frighten the birds away from fishing vessels reeling out the lines.
"They form a visible deterrent and a no-go zone close to the bait and fishing gear as it's reeled out," explains Graham Madge of the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which co-launched the Albatross Task Force in 2006 with BirdLife International to stop albatrosses being snagged on hooks and drowning as they try to steal bait.
