WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM ENTANGLEMENT CASES OF WHALES AND TURTLES IN MUSSEL FARMING GEAR   

With growing social and economic pressures to farm the open ocean, there is an increasing need to understand the potential conflicts posed between new farming structures and protected marine species that roam those areas. A summation of the literature and informal interviews yields a few but mostly not very well-documented cases of entanglement of whales or turtles in mussel farming gear. Entanglements are either rare or they go unreported. Nevertheless, lessons can be drawn about the nature of the documented entanglements and the gear involved (mostly spat collection lines in the case of mussel farming), and we present some conclusions about how these interactions can be reduced or avoided by employing temporal, spatial and engineering solutions.