Sean Brillant

Canadian Wildlife Federation · Conservation Science

Time-area closures are increasingly used to mitigate cetacean entanglement by temporarily excluding fishing effort from areas where high densities of cetaceans and fishing overlap. The effort displaced by these closures can be redistributed to the areas that remain open, changing the distribution and density of fishing effort outside the closures....

Studies of ship strikes on whales often focus on large vessels (>20 m), with attention to their speeds and the resulting risk of lethality. Smaller coastal vessels also co‐occur with whales, resulting in collisions that merit study. To cast light on injuries caused by vessels of all sizes, we used knowledge of right whale anatomy and Newtonian mech...

The 2017 North Atlantic right whale (NARW) unusual mortality event and an increase in humpback whale entanglements off the U.S. West Coast have driven significant interest in ropeless trap/pot fishing. Removing the vertical buoy lines used to mark traps on the sea floor and haul them up would dramatically reduce or eliminate entanglements, the lead...

Abandoned, lost and discarded (ALD) fishing gear causes economic losses and hazards to safety at-sea for fishers and marine fauna. Thirty-two lobster fishers and 5 individuals from fisheries management agencies were interviewed from the Bay of Fundy (BoF), Eastern Canada to determine how to mitigate risk to marine fauna from ALD fishing gear. Resul...

“If we don't take robust, science-based, coherent measures to protect these highly endangered North Atlantic right whales, we're really playing Russian roulette with the entire future of the Canadian fish and seafood industry,” Fisheries and Oceans Minister Dominic LeBlanc, CBC New Brunswick, 16 June 2018. Governments are required to demonstrate th...

The survival of federally protected North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) requires an immediate reduction in the risk of entanglement in commercial fishing gear. This paper argues that at least a 30% reduction in risk is needed to meaningfully contribute to the conservation of right whales. The argument follows from risk estimates calcu...

General movement patterns for North Atlantic right whales are known, but quantitative season-specific estimates of individual movements and the resultant distributions do not exist. We use a Brownian Bridge movement model to estimate individual movement patterns and spatial probability distributions using time- and location-specific photo-identifie...

Blue sharks (Prionace glauca) represent a significant portion of the catch in the Canadian pelagic longline fishery targeting swordfish and tunas. The capture of sharks represents a significant financial loss to industry, therefore, reducing the capture of sharks is a shared interest between conservationists and fishermen. Sharks have the ability t...

Brillant, S. W., and Trippel, E. A. 2010. Elevations of lobster fishery groundlines in relation to their potential to entangle endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy, Canada. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 67: 355–364. Fishing gear is known to be a threat to North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis), and groundlines u...

The hypothesis was examined that vigilance of harbour seals,Phoca vitulina, on haul-out sites decreases with time since haul out. The study was conducted in the Bay of Fundy, Canada, where the seals haul out onto newly exposed rocky ledges on falling tides. Initial scanning time of newly hauled-out harbour seals during the first 3min after haul out...