The use of fish aggregating devices (FADs) is ubiquitous across tropical tuna purse seine fisheries with FAD-associated fishing accounting for close to 40% of global landings of skipjack, bigeye and yellowfin tunas1. First introduced in industrial tuna fisheries in the mid-1980s, drifting FADs (dFADs) have proliferated with an estimated 20,000 - 40,000 dFADs deployed each year in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean alone. Globally, between 81,000 and 121,000 FADs were set adrift in 2013, a 14 percent increase over the course of two years2. The use of FADs will likely continue at a high level into the future due to the efficiency benefits they provide to fishermen and current lack of effective regulation and monitoring. The use of dFADs has a significant environmental impact, contributing to marine debris entangling and killing marine life, ghost fishing. Furthermore, it contributes to a high fishing mortality of juvenile yellowfin and bigeye tunas and results in the unintended capture of turtles, sharks, and marine mammals as bycatch. Finally, there is a mounting concern that dFADs are washing up on shores, causing damage to coastal ecosystems.

This has become an issue of increasing concern in French Polynesia, where dFAD strandings are increasingly common and causing substantial damage to local marine ecosystems and compromising the delivery of ecosystem services, even though none of these dFADs originate in French Polynesia. This project aims to explore and discover innovative solutions to mitigate the above mentioned threats (or eliminate them altogether) while allowing for their continued use.