Across borders: external factors and prior behavior influence North Pacific albatross associations with fishing vessels

1. Understanding encounters between marine predators and fisheries across national borders and outside national jurisdictions offers new perspectives on unwanted interactions to inform ocean management and predator conservation. Although seabird-fisheries overlap has been documented at many scales, remote identification of vessel encounters has lagged because vessel movement data often is lacking.

2. Here, we reveal albatross-fisheries associations throughout the North Pacific Ocean. We identified commercial fishing operations using Global Fishing Watch data and algorithms to detect fishing vessels. We compiled GPS tracks of adult black-footed (Phoebastria nigripes) and Laysan (P. immutabilis) albatrosses, and juvenile short-tailed albatrosses (P. albatrus). We quantified albatross-vessel encounters based on the assumed distance that birds perceive a vessel (≤30km), and associations when birds approached vessels (≤3km). For each event we quantified bird behavior, environmental condit...