Googly-eyed buoys and kites help keep seabirds out of fishing nets, study finds

Off the coast of Cornwall in southwest England, a pole rises from a buoy with a pair of big eyes on top. The head spins, creating what researchers call an “animated eye effect.” Its job is to scare away seabirds away before they dive into the fishing net below. On other nets, a kite shaped like a bird of prey flies from a pole. According to a new study in Conservation Letters, both devices reduced the chance that diving seabirds would drown in gillnets. Nets fitted with the kites had 71% lower odds of catching an auk, the bird family that includes guillemots and razorbills. Nets fitted with the buoys had 59% lower odds. “People may enjoy seeing seabirds around our coasts, but very few witness the moment when a diving bird encounters fishing gear,” lead author Tom Horton, a research fellow at the University of Exeter, told Mongabay. Gillnets are a major threat to diving birds because the birds forage underwater, where they can get tangled in the mesh, the authors write. Gillnets in the Baltic Sea and Northeast Atlantic kill more than 95,000 seabirds a year, according to a 2024 review. Across all European fisheries, about 31,000 common guillemots (Uria aalge) die as bycatch each year, the same review found. Fixes have been hard to find. An earlier trial of the eye buoys in Iceland’s lumpfish fishery found they didn’t reduce bycatch. “Gillnets have proved a real challenge to develop mitigation methods for and pose a significant threat…This article was originally published on Mongabay