"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"--Chapter 1, paragraph 1.

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