Summary
Pelagic longline and trawl fisheries are known to kill large numbers of albatrosses worldwide. However, the impact on individual species and populations has rarely been assessed, often because many albatross species are difficult to identify. Shy albatrosses (Thalassarche cauta), an Australian endemic species, are thought to encounter fisheries that kill large numbers of seabirds (particularly in waters around southern Africa), but because these albatrosses are very similar to white-capped albatrosses (T. steadi) the impact on this species is not known. This project successfully applied a simple DNA-based species identification test to 254 tissue samples collected from shy-type (shy and white-capped) albatrosses killed by longline fisheries operating in South African waters. Of these, 13 (5.1%) were identified as shy albatrosses and the remaining 241 (94.9%) as white-capped albatrosses. These data imply that shy and white-capped albatrosses display fundamentally different dispersal behaviours which in turn influence their exposure to fisheries with high rates of seabird bycatch. Based on the bycatch rates presented here it is estimated that approximately 300 shy and 5,000 white-capped albatrosses are killed annually in South African fisheries and, in total, 400 shy and 8,000 white-capped albatrosses are killed in the world’s fisheries each year.