A recent study reveals that drifting fish aggregating devices (dFADs), widely used in tuna fishing, have spread to more than a third of the world’s oceans.  These devices harm ocean life and coastal communities, but weak rules and lack of accountability make it hard to manage them properly, some conservationists say. The study, published in […]

A recent study reveals that drifting fish aggregating devices (dFADs), widely used in tuna fishing, have spread to more than a third of the world’s oceans.  These devices harm ocean life and coastal communities, but weak rules and lack of accountability make it hard to manage them properly, some conservationists say. The study, published in May in Science Advances, estimates tuna boats deployed 1.41 million dFADs between 2007 and 2021. They drifted through the waters of 157 countries and across at least 134 million square kilometers (nearly 52 million square miles) — about 37% of the world’s oceans. Many were lost at sea and stranded in 104 maritime jurisdictions, the study showed, polluting coastlines and harming marine habitats. “Stranded dFADs can cause local habitat loss and pollution, especially where they involve the use of plastic netting, which is now being phased out,” study co-author Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, told Mongabay via email. “Cleaning up stranded dFADs can be very costly, and so far no progress has been made to make companies liable for the damage their devices cause.” Stranded dFads dFADs are floating rafts with underwater netting used by tuna purse seiners to attract skipjack, yellowfin and bigeye tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis, Thunnus albacares and T. obesus). The tuna school around such floating objects in pursuit of the prey that gather in their shade. One vessel can deploy hundreds of dFADs annually. Fitted with GPS and echo-sounder buoys, they drift with currents for…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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