The conservation group, Oceana, released a report revealing that 17 to 22% of all fish caught by US fishermen is discarded, which means that two billion pounds of sea life gets wasted every year. 'Bycatch' animals are often tossed overboard or they get injured due to rough fishing practices.

In the report, 'Wasted Catch', the environmental group officials said during this activity, many protected marine species like dolphins, seals and sea turtles get affected. The practice is one of the biggest threats to maintain healthy fish populations across the world.

"Bycatch, or the catch of non-target fish and ocean wildlife, is one of the largest threats to maintaining healthy fish populations and marine ecosystems around the world", revealed the report.

It is not a recent problem and has been in existence for past many decades. One of the main reasons for the same is that bycatch activity remained largely unregistered. The report officials revealed the bycatch includes entangled wildlife and discarded fish that cannot be used due to wrong size, poor quality and low market value.

Geoff Shester, California program director for Oceana said they have identified the nine dirtiest fisheries across the United States. Two of those fisheries are the set gillnet fishery for halibut and the drift gillnet fishery for swordfish. These are used on the U.S. West Coast in Southern California.

As per Shester, both the fishing practices have bycatch rate more than 60%. Drift gillnets have entangled many species of whales and other animals. For now, there is no penalty on bycatch. Though there are equipments to minus endangered sea turtles from getting caught in gillnets, they are often incorrectly installed.

Oceana has suggested two measures. Firstly, incentives should be provided to fishermen to reduce bycatch and promotion of more selective fishing gear should be done.