For Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, what happened on Saturday, July 25, must have felt like a palace coup. At the tail end of a four-day meeting of the council in Kona, Simonds had … Continued
For the first time, the Hawai`i longline fleet is operating under catch limits for its most lucrative haul – bigeye tuna – throughout virtually the entire area it fishes. Yet the trade group representing the 125 or so longline vessels … Continued
Honolulu doesn’t even make the list of the nation’s top 10 ports when it comes to the volume of fish landed, but the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council leads the way when it comes to dollars hauled in. According to … Continued
What’s one or two more dead Pacific loggerhead or leatherback sea turtles a year going to mean for the survival of those species? According to the federal Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, probably nothing. Conservationists, on the other hand, believe … Continued
For the last year, the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council has been paying Leimana DaMate to organize a series of meetings, called puwalu, that bring together Native Hawaiians to discuss approaches to managing Hawai`i’s ocean resources. But has the process, … Continued
“It’s hard, but it’s done already,” Dennis Kamikawa told the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council at its June meeting. Kamikawa, a commercial bottomfisherman for more than 15 years, is resigned to the harsh limits on bottomfishing recently laid down by … Continued
If the Hawai`i longline fleet is consistently reaching or nearing its annual limit on interactions with endangered sea turtles – without even fishing as hard as it’s allowed to – then why should the Hawai`i Longline Association and the Western … Continued
At 7:09 a.m. on March 20, the National Marine Fisheries Service closed the shallow-set longline fishery, commonly known as the swordfish fishery. The fishery’s take limit for loggerhead sea turtles had been reached, and the resulting closure, noticed in the … Continued
Remembering A Giant: News of the passing of Hampton Carson last December was greeted with sadness by members of Hawai‘i’s environmental community. Carson, an emeritus professor of genetics at the University of Hawai‘i, had done path-breaking research into the evolu … Continued
In July 2004, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve’s advisory council developed a preferred fishing alternative for the proposed NWHI National Marine Sanctuary. It included a 40 nautical mile zone around the islands stretching from Nihoa to Kure, … Continued