194 | Chapter 10
either remained close to Iles Kerguelen or went much further, to Ant-
arctica, risking an encounter with longlining vessels in either location.
Indeed the map of where the petrels and vessels respectively concen-
trated their efforts would lead one to suspect an unhappy conjunction.
This was wrong, and it could be shown to be wrong because there was
information about exactly where in the Southern Ocean the legally-
operating vessels set their lines. Not one of 2,500 petrel positions, as
determined from the satellite data, was within 15 km of an operating
toothfish vessel. That birds and vessels were mostly minding their own
business was confirmed by diet analysis: just 4 percent – or possibly
slightly more – of the food fed to petrel chicks was sourced from the
fishing fleet, for example bait fish.
While seabirds and fishers often and inevitably use the same broad
areas, the Macaroni Penguin and White- chinned Petrel examples under-
score how this is not necessarily a problem for seabird conservation in
every circumstance. Rather than assume that seabirds and fishers are
forever at daggers drawn, the way forward may be to identify where in-
teraction between seabirds and fishing is most likely and then follow
two routes towards conservation.
The first is to minimize the likelihood of traumatic deaths when sea-
birds meet a fishing vessel, as discussed earlier in the chapter. It may be
that there is such a high risk that any meeting is likely to be traumatic.
Then the only way to prevent such encounters is to forbid fishing –
which may be feasible on a small spatial scale and/or for short periods.
As mentioned in Chapter 5, the brood stage is a period when the Wan-
dering Albatrosses of South Georgia are constrained by the needs of the
small chick and do not wander far. During that brooding season, the
region subject to fishery closures totally encompasses the area of highest
use by Wandering Albatrosses, an ideal outcome from a conservation
perspective.^19
A second way forward is to map hotspots of seabird activity, and
consider whether the ecological interaction between fisheries and sea-
birds, via their joint impact on fish stocks, is likely to be harmful to
seabirds. This is a much less tractable proposition. Globally these hot spot
areas may be so extensive that it is unrealistic to argue that all should be
closed to fisheries in order to protect seabirds. Therefore the next logical