The size of the European-owned fleet has grown considerably since its beginnings in the 1980s, largely due to the intensive use of FADs [13]. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s French and Spanish fishing companies invested in larger purse seine vessels, at an estimated cost of US$20 million per vessel, which offered numerous commercial advantages including the ability to make extended fishing trips with larger fish-wells [7]. However, because larger vessels are more sensitive to increasing operating costs (e.g. fuel price; [33]) it was necessary for fishing companies to adopt increasingly competitive fishing strategies to achieve the high annual catch thresholds necessary to remain profitable (e.g. circa 15–20,000 t; Fonteneau, personal communication). Consequently, purse seine firms have become increasing reliant on the use of FADs to achieve the very large catches needed to remain profitable [24] and [7].