Longline fisheries catch fish on a long line, which is, simply, a long piece of rope or nylon that lies in the water supporting baited hooks. There are two types of longlining: surface longlining and bottom longlining.
Surface longlines are suspended about 200 m beneath the surface and are used to catch tuna and swordfish. They might exceed 100 km in length and carry 3,000 baited hooks suspended on 40 m-long branch lines spaced 50 m apart. When longlines are paid out from vessels seabirds attack the baited hooks, get caught or entangled in gear, are drawn underwater and drown.
Every year hundreds of millions of baited hooks are set by tuna and swordfish longliners in the oceans where vulnerable seabird species range.
The second kind of longlining is bottom longlining which is used to catch deep water fishes such as ling, hake and Patagonian toothfish. Bottom longlines are heavier than surface longlines - the ropes used are made of heavier materials and weights are often attached to lines to make them sink. Bottom longlines carry more hooks on much shorter lines than surface longlines.
Patagonian toothfish is the main fish caught near the sub Antarctic islands. Longliners target toothfish down to 2,000 m deep on lines up to 30 km long carrying 20,000 hooks, which are set and hauled in every day of the fishing operation. Every year bottom longliners set hundreds of millions of baited hooks into oceans inhabited by albatrosses.
Albatrosses interact with fisheries because albatrosses and fishermen think alike - in essence they both fish for a living and they both know where the most productive waters lie.
The richest waters occur around the margins of continents and islands such as New Zealand, South America and South Georgia. Ocean fronts, where water masses mix and upwell, are also productive, such as the boundary between the sub Antarctic and sub Tropical fronts off Brazil and across the width of the Indian Ocean. Albatrosses and fishermen both favour these areas and this is mainly why they come in contact with each other.
What can you do to help?
 Donate to Save the Albatross Campaign
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Surface Longlining
Bottom Longlining
Productive fishing waters shown in blue
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Conservation 
