Analysis Reveals Scale of UK Bycatch
A new report has found that fishing boats in UK waters are killing thousands of protected marine animals every year.
This will come as absolutely no surprise to animal rights campaigners and long-time advocates. It is not a revelation. It is a receipt.
Wildlife and Countryside Link’s Hidden in the Haul report estimates that UK fishing boats catch and kill more than 10,000 seabirds every year. More than 1,000 harbour porpoises and common dolphins. Around 500 seals. More than 1,000 endangered Atlantic salmon. More than 120 tonnes of protected sharks, skates and rays. Humpback whales and minke whales are also being found dead in Scottish creel ropes. The public is sold a sanitised story about fishing. Small boats. Coastal communities. Tradition. A plate of fish and chips wrapped in nostalgia. The animals get nets, hooks, ropes and drowning.
The industry calls it bycatch. That word does a lot of work. It sounds passive, technical and unavoidable. It makes the dead disappear into a category. A dolphin is not a dolphin. A gannet is not a gannet. A seal is not a seal. They become “non-target species”, “incidental catch”, “collateral damage”. Language turns someone into waste.
But these animals are not mistakes. They are victims of a system that throws killing gear into their home and then acts surprised when the killing does not stay neatly contained.
Fishing gear does not respect species boundaries. Nets dragged through the water or across the seabed do not select only the animals humans want to sell. Static nets hang like invisible walls. Seabirds dive into them and drown. Porpoises and dolphins become trapped underwater. Seals are caught. Sharks, skates and rays are hauled up as unwanted bodies. Atlantic salmon, already endangered, are pulled into another human-made threat.
The report says the figures are likely an underestimate because monitoring is so poor. Current government-led monitoring covers only 2.4% of days at sea for midwater trawling, 1.2% for static net fishing, 0.7% for seabed trawling, 0.05% for dredging and less than 0.01% for trap fishing.
In other words, the cameras are mostly off. Since 2021, fishers have been legally required to report marine mammal bycatch to the Marine Management Organisation. They have reported nine marine mammals. Nine.
The estimates suggest thousands of marine mammals have been caught in that period. This is what happens when an industry is trusted to mark its own homework while dead animals sink out of sight. The report calls for remote electronic monitoring on all fishing boats in English waters, including smaller boats under 10 metres. It calls for time-bound Bycatch Action Plans. It calls for stronger measures on high-risk gear, especially static nets. It points to Filey Bay in Yorkshire, where seabird deaths fell from about 700 a year to four or five after fishers worked with conservationists and changed methods. So the issue is not mystery. It is not ignorance. It is not impossibility. It is refusal.
Governments have known about this for decades. The UK already has legal duties to minimise and, where possible, eliminate incidental catches of sensitive species. The requirement to reach Good Environmental Status for UK seas was supposed to be met by 2020. Bycatch is one of the reasons that has not happened. The law exists. The reports exist. The bodies exist.
What is missing is political will.
And even here, the conversation is still too narrow. Bycatch is treated as the accidental killing that happens around the “real” killing. The animals targeted by fishing are still framed as food, stock, quota and product. Their deaths are normalised so completely that public outrage only begins when the wrong animals are caught. That is the moral failure at the centre of this.
A dolphin drowning in a net is not tragic because dolphins are charismatic. A gannet drowning in a gillnet is not wrong because seabirds are protected. A shark caught and discarded is not a problem only because their population is threatened.
They are all someone.
So are the fish the nets were set for. Bycatch exposes the lie that fishing can be clean or selective. It shows what animal use always shows when we look closely enough: once animals are treated as resources, their lives become negotiable. Some are the intended product. Others are the acceptable loss. The sea is not a supermarket. It is a home.
And fishing fills it with traps.