Careful Release Protocols for Sea Turtle Release with Minimal Injury

Note: these protocols have been revised in 2010 to incude a modified careful handling placdard 'Sea turtle handling/release guidelines: Quick reference for hook and line fisheries' in Appendix D. Required and approved gear examples are no longer listed in this document and mist be obtained from the Federal Register or Code of Federal Regulations. No other changes have been made at this time.

The following sea turtle handling protocols describe the tools and techniques for removing fishing gear from incidentally captured sea turtles. They should be followed whenever an interaction, such as a hooking and/or an entanglement, with a sea turtle occurs. The equipment and techniques described here are intended to reduce sea turtle injury and to promote post-release survival. The document, which updates Epperly et al. 2004, is designed primarily to give specific handling guidelines for removing gear from sea turtles captured in hook-and-line fisheries. Interactions with other gear types (e.g., trawls, gillnets, fixed gear) and species (e.g., fish, marine mammals) are mentioned briefly here, but this is not intended to be a comprehensive guide for interactions with these gear types or species.

These protocols synthesize the results of scientific research involving sea turtle mitigation measures and post-hooking mortality criteria developed for pelagic longline fisheries. In 2001-2003, experiments were conducted in the Western Atlantic Northeast Distant Waters statistical reporting area (NED) to evaluate sea turtle mitigation measures in the pelagic longline fisheries (Watson et al. 2004, Watson et al. 2005). Post-trip interviews with the captains and NMFS observers were conducted to specifically discuss the efficacy of various tools provided to remove gear from sea turtles. Based on user feedback from these experiments and field-testing subsequent to these experiments, gear removal tools have been updated, and equipment design standards have been revised accordingly.