As a result, the albatross data had unintentionally revealed the potential extent and scale of illegal fishing in the Southern Ocean.

Its difficult to imagine a human patrol boat being able to cover enough area to efficiently track illegal fisheries. But each wandering albatross could potentially cover the same area of ocean as a boat, and when its logger detects a fishing boat with its AIS turned off, it can relay that information to the authorities, who can alert nearby vessels to investigate.

Data collection on this scale would not only improve our ability to detect and manage illegal fisheries, but also to identify high risk areas for conservation. This would help conserve fish stocks, protect albatrosses and other seabirds, and manage the marine ecosystem as a whole.

As ocean sentinels, it turns out that albatrosses have a unique ability to collect the data needed for their own conservation.

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Samantha Patrick is a senior lecturer in marine biology at the University of Liverpool.

This articleoriginally appearedon The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.This is also why this story does not have an estimate for its carbon emissions, as Future Planet stories usually do.

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