The Hawai‘i shallow-set longline fishery has struggled lately to slow its catches of endangered loggerhead sea turtles. As a result, it was shut down on March 19, after hitting its annual limit of 17 takes.
This comes a year after a federal court order reduced the take limit from 34 to 17 and forced the fishery — which targets swordfish — to close in May while the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) completed a new biological opinion on the fleet’s impacts on loggerhead and leatherback turtles.
The fishery had caught 33 loggerheads before being shut down last year.
NMFS was expected to release a draft biological opinion last October, but that deadline was pushed to January, then later to late-March. As of press time, it still had not been issued, despite a final opinion being slated for completion by the end of this month.
The Biological Opinion (BiOp) Review Advisory Panel, a subset of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, will meet on April 12 to consider the new draft biological opinion, with the full council meeting later that afternoon by teleconference to prepare its recommendations to NMFS.
The population modeling studies of T. Todd Jones of the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center play a key role in the BiOp. Jones’ modeling predicts that the North Pacific loggerhead population will increase very slightly over time, while the leatherback population will decrease. Currently, the annual cap for leatherbacks is 26.
NMFS staff has estimated that the fishery will likely interact with up to 37 loggerheads and 21 leatherbacks a year, but it’s unclear how NMFS will factor in those projected take levels in setting the new hard caps. Last year, the council proposed that NMFS simply set the caps at the estimated take levels without regard to the impact their removal from the turtle populations would have on the species’ ability to recover, or even survive.
While the rate at which the fishery caught loggerheads last year was much higher than it has been this year, the fleet this year was catching, on average, about 1.5 of them a week. At that rate, the fishery would still have closed about the same time it did last year, perhaps a few weeks later, had the loggerhead cap been increased to 37.
At the council’s meeting last month, member Mike Goto lamented the effects this year’s closure has had and will have on the fishery.
Many vessels within the fleet didn’t have a chance to set gear, he said, and crews that were flown in for this fishery have had to return to port and switch gear so they can pursue bigeye tuna.
While nobody is losing their job because of the closure, Goto said the fishers are losing time. Russell Ito of the Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center told the council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee that the fishery had also invested in supplies, such as light sticks and expensive bait, to catch swordfish. Ito also noted that it’s a marketing nightmare for the fish auction, which Goto manages, with all of the fleet’s swordfish coming into port at once.
What’s more, Goto told the council, the market is losing product.
“It’s throwing everything back into a chaotic ball, whether it’s an area closure or fishery closure,” he said, alluding to the closure earlier this year of a large portion of the deep-set longline fleet’s fishing ground due to interactions with false killer whales.
Goto later read to the council testimony from Roger Dang, whose family owns more than 20 fishing vessels. Dang had written it while attending a Seafood Show in Boston and stated that he was testifying “on behalf of the entire community of Hawai’i’s swordfish fleet and others in the fishing industry, including fish buyers and wholesalers, fishing gear and bait suppliers, and logistics companies.”
Dang called the recently announced swordfish fishery closure “highly untimely and unfortunate,” especially given that they had spent the last several months working with some of the largest swordfish buyers in the country to “develop a buying and shipping program to support the US/Hawai‘i swordfish fishery.”
“These buyers initially expressed concerns on the reliability and continuity of supply because of the hard cap being reached in 2018. Still, they committed since the start of the 2019 season and, just as recently as yesterday, agreed to decrease their reliance on foreign imported swordfish and increase their purchases of Hawai‘i swordfish,” Dang continued.
“The lengthy delay of a biological opinion was critical for us, and we feel the agency has failed us greatly. This has directly caused our mainland U.S. partners to lose confidence in our ability to sustain production, and I fear that they will continue to discount Hawai‘i as a reliable source of swordfish going into the future,” he wrote.
Council member McGrew Rice asked Mike Tosatto, administrator for NMFS’s Pacific Islands Regional Office, how quickly the fishery could be opened once the new biological opinion is completed, noting that the fall is a good time of year to catch swordfish.
Tosatto did not give a specific date, explaining that he was trying not to get too far ahead of “all the ‘what ifs.’”
Whenever the opinion is completed, “the market is obviously going to take a hit,” Goto said, adding that the Hawai‘i fleet provides at least half of the country’s domestic swordfish. “This is a very desired fishery. … It’s crucial we gain the support of all parties otherwise we’re looking at the dissolution of the shallow-set fishery,” he said.
Council member Christinna Lutu-Sanchez asked Tosatto whether his agency needed more staff to complete biological opinions.
“The broadest answer is yes,” he replied. He explained that NMFS has long lacked adequate capacity nationwide to process consultations. Consultation hotspots have rotated around the country and at times, the number of outstanding consultations have numbered in the hundreds, he said.
“The administration has asked for more resources. Congress didn’t respond to that in exactly the same way. We do expect a modest increase in consultation resources in the regional office. Our science center received no commensurate increases … to meet the scientific needs,” he said.
He added that external factors, including unfortunate time lags to “dot Is and cross Ts,” contribute to delays in the consultation process.
Elena Onaga with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of General Counsel said her office has also been asking for additional staff, but is still able to complete legal reviews fairly quickly and accurately. However, she added, “The scrutiny [required so] that we have a defensible document, that we will not lose on, takes a little more time.”
— Teresa Dawson
Leave a Reply