Due to a court order, the National Marine Fisheries Service has closed a longline shallow-set fishery off the coast in Hawaii for the rest of the year, ending a five-and-a-half-year-old lawsuit brought on by environmental groups.
The closure comes as part of a settlement reached earlier this month between the federal government and the plaintiffs, Turtle Island Restoration Network and the Center for Biological Diversity. Those organizations filed suit in 2012 after the NMFS was granted an expansion of the longline fishery for swordfish, claiming it significantly harms loggerhead sea turtles and other marine life.
In December, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling and determined the expansion would harm the loggerhead population. The appellate court, however, upheld the lower court’s ruling on leatherback turtles.
Upon the parties reaching the agreement, U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway issued an order on 4 May closing the fishery for the rest of the calendar year and requiring NMFS to return the bycatch limit for loggerhead turtles to 17 for 2019.
The expansion set the bycatch limit at 34.
The plaintiffs claim loggerheads, leatherbacks and other marine life get caught in the hooks from the nearly invisible lines. Those encounters can lead to drownings or other fatal injuries.
“We scored a victory for loggerhead sea turtles,” said Todd Steiner, biologist and executive director of Turtle Island Restoration Network. “For decades the Hawai’i longline fishery has gotten away with killing and injuring sea turtles, seabirds and marine mammals. A healthy ocean belongs to all of us and shouldn’t be threatened by a small group of industrial fishing vessels.”
While the organizations celebrated the ruling, they also said their fight is not over.
“For a few months, sea turtles will get a respite from millions of deadly hooks,” said Miyoko Sakashita, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “But more needs to be done to address permanently the very real harm caused by longliners in the Pacific.”
According to NOAA Fisheries data, 13 vessels made 40 excursions in the fishery during 2016. Those trips yielded 11,574 fish. Of that total, 8,874 were swordfish, NOAA spokesman John Ewald told SeafoodSource. Data for 2017 is not yet available.
Photo courtesy of NOAA
