Longline

A longline is a fishing gear made of a long mainline carrying many baited hooks on branch lines (snoods), set either drifting in the water column (pelagic longline) for tuna and swordfish or anchored on the seabed (bottom longline) for cod, hake, and toothfish. A single set can deploy thousands of hooks over tens of kilometers. Longlining is relatively selective by hook size and bait but generates seabird, sea-turtle, and shark bycatch, so the tuna RFMOs and CCAMLR require circle hooks, streamer lines, line weighting, and night setting. Catch is reported as catch-per-hook or per thousand hooks.