New Report Supports Lifting Annual Limit On Interactions between Loggerheads, Fishers

For the most part, the National Marine Fisheries Service agrees with the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council’s proposed rule changes for Hawai`i’s shallow-set longline swordfish fishery, and based on the council’s recommendations, the service is expected to announce new rules that will allow the fishery to harass, injure or kill up to 138 threatened loggerhead sea turtles over a three-year period, an average of 46 “takes” a year. Current rules cap the taking of loggerheads at 17 a year.

On October 15, the NMFS released its biological opinion (BiOp) on the council’s proposal – initiated by the Hawai`i Longline Association in February 2007 – to eliminate the effort limit (2,120 sets a year) on the fishery and increase the hard caps for loggerhead and endangered leatherback turtle takes. In the BiOp, which is required under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act, the service supported the council’s recommendation to increase the number of annual interactions the fishery can have with threatened loggerhead sea turtles from 17 to 46. The BiOp states that considering increases in nesting over the years (due in large part to the council’s conservation efforts in Japan), such an increase would probably not reduce “reproduction, numbers, or distribution of the North Pacific loggerhead population.”

NMFS did not, however, support the council’s recommendation to increase the annual hard cap for interactions with endangered leatherback turtles from 16 to 19, even though it found that both proposed increases would result in less than three dead adult females of each species a year, which – again, according to the biological opinion – would not jeopardize the survival of either species. The BiOp stated that because of concern about the declining nesting levels of the Western Pacific leatherback population, NMFS could not support increasing the leatherback take limit.

While the council had asked NMFS to incorporate into the BiOp the council’s conservation efforts – in Japan, Indonesia, and Baja Mexico – as an offset to the Hawai`i longline fleet’s impacts on turtle populations, the agency chose not to since the conservation measures and the proposed rule changes are “two different actions with regard to ESA Section 7,” NMFS deputy assistant administrator Samuel Rauch wrote in a July 22 letter to council executive director Kitty Simonds.

Although the council did not get everything it wanted, on October 17, the council revised its recommendations to reflect the BiOp’s findings, and again asked NMFS to consider using or including results of conservation projects in future BiOps. Council member Peter Young, a stalwart opponent of the proposed increases, dissented, while state of Hawai`i council representative Dan Polhemus, who had also voted against the measure in the past, did not, since the vote was “in alignment with the BiOp.”

Before the vote, NMFS Pacific Island Regional Office’s Lance Smith, who helped write the BiOp, explained that although an annual take level of 19 might not jeopardize the leatherback population, his agency felt it was necessary to keep the leatherback take level at 16 as a mitigation measure.

“So it’s a precautionary decision on your part,” Simonds said.

“We look at it that way,” Smith said.

Several government agencies and conservation organizations, including the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, submitted written testimony against raising the effort and take limits. An October 6 letter from the Ocean Conservancy, the Turtle Island Restoration Network, the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Center for Biological Diversity, points out that in November 2007, NMFS determined that a petition from two of the groups to reclassify the North Pacific population of loggerheads from threatened to endangered status “may be warranted.”

“In light of NMFS’s own findings that the North Pacific loggerhead could be quasi-extinct within a few decades and may warrant significantly greater protection, a proposal that nearly triples the number of these turtles allowed to interact with the Hawai`i shallow-set longline fishery is inappropriate to say the least,” they wrote.

Despite the various arguments against the proposal, council staffer Eric Kingma said none of them provided any basis for revising the council’s position. (All of the written comments were based on NMFS’s draft environmental impact statement for the proposal, and not on the BiOp, which was released in the middle of the council’s three-day meeting.)

At the council’s meeting, Jim Cook of the Hawai`i Longline Association (and a former council chair) testified that while the environmental effects of eliminating the 2,120-set effort limit and increasing the turtle takes would be minimal, the benefit to the economy and the fishery will be huge, with potential catches worth between $20 million and $40 million.

Dismayed that it wasn’t credited for its conservation efforts abroad that may be propping up sea turtle populations, the council approved a recommendation that a letter be sent to NMFS asking that council staff be allowed to preview BiOps before they are released so it can provide information on the best science available.

(More background on this topic is contained in the following articles, available at no charge to subscribers, at [url=http://www.environment-hawaii.org]www.environment-hawaii.org[/url] Non-subscribers may purchase a 2-day archives pass for $10: “Fishery Council Narrows Scope of Study on Expanded Longlining Effort,” November 2007, “Fisheries Council Approves Proposal to Raise Caps on Turtle Interactions,” May 2008, and “Fishing Council Relaxes Turtle Limits, NMFS to Initiate New Biological Opinion,” August 2008.)

At the council’s October meeting, scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center unveiled a new and improved bottomfish stock assessment, which indicates that overfishing is still occurring in the Main Hawaiian Islands, but not to the extent as previously thought. And while some council members held differing, and sometimes opposing, views on the soundness of the assessment, the council approved a recommendation to increase the annual bottomfish catch limit in the MHI from 178,000 pounds to 241,000 pounds. This new level is for the fishing season that opened on November 15 and will end next August 31.

In 2006, using state Division of Aquatic Resources commercial catch data from as far back as the late 1940s, NMFS determined that the “deep seven” species of bottomfish in the MHI (ehu, hapupu`u, kalekale, onaga, lehi, gindai, and opakapaka) were being caught at an unsustainable rate, and ordered state and federal agencies take immediate action to bring catch rates down to safer levels. So, based on an admittedly weak stock assessment by NMFS scientists, the council set an annual total allowable catch limit (TAC) of 178,000 pounds and the state instituted a revised complex of closed areas. The TAC represented a 24 percent reduction from the commercial catch in 2004.

But this past fall, in response to concerns raised by the council about the stock assessment’s accuracy, the science center revisited and standardized its data and came out with a new assessment. NMFS also came up with several possible TACs that posed varying degrees of risk of overfishing. While the previous stock assessment suggested that there has been a 70 percent decline in the catch per unit effort (CPUE) since the late 1940s for MHI bottomfish, the new assessment, which included a larger sample of trips per year, indicates that the decline has been no more than 50 percent.

At the council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee meeting, which was held just prior to the council’s meeting, the committee found several faults with the assessment and chose to do its own preliminary analysis of the data. Its results were vastly different. The SSC found that the stock is not being overfished and that over the past 15 years, the fishery has been quite stable. Instead of supporting NMFS’s recommended 2008/2009 season TAC of 249,000 pounds, which would pose a 50 percent risk of overfishing in the MHI, the SSC recommended a TAC of 254,050, which is significant reduction of the average catch for the deep seven species from 1982 through 2007.

In supporting the SSC’s recommendation, new council member Dave Itano said, “Data from the early years is very suspect. The NMFS’s refinement is good, but I wouldn’t take it as gospel. The data is so poor and the conclusions are so broad,” he said, adding that using more recent data, which the SSC did, is more reliable.

Council member Dan Polhemus recommended keeping the TAC at 178,000 pounds at first, then suggested increasing it to 200,000 pounds, which represented the maximum fleet capacity over the past few years. NMFS Pacific Islands Regional Office director William Robinson, on the other hand, suggested a TAC of 241,000, which posed a 40 percent risk of overfishing and would provide a “management buffer” in case the fishery accidentally overshoots the TAC.

After a motion by Polhemus to keep the TAC at 178,000 pounds failed, council member Manuel Duenas moved to accept Robinson’s suggested TAC of 241,000. The motion passed, with Polhemus and council member Peter Young voting in opposition.

Often at its meetings, the council will schedule informational presentations that are either directly or tangentially related to the council’s business of fisheries management. So in addition to presentations on the status of the state’s `Aha Kiole advisory committee and the Hawai`i aquaculture industry, the council in October heard a presentation by Pierre Kleiber, a statistician who sits on the council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, titled, “Truth and Honesty in Fishery Science.” But during Klieber’s presentation, it became unclear whether he was speaking to the council or to the conservationists sitting in the audience.

Kleiber touched on several topics that he believes have been skewed in scientific journals and in the media, including concerns over mercury in fish and a famous paper by fisheries scientists Ransom Myers and Boris Worm in the journal Nature that suggested massive overfishing was occurring globally.

“This paper is just wringing our hands,” he said about the Nature article, adding that the authors selectively used just a portion of catch data from what was available and omitted any tag data or size information. He showed charts comparing the Worm and Myers results to those derived from data taken by the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission on catches of albacore and bigeye tuna that showed wildly divergent stock scenarios. Although Klieber and other local fisheries scientists prepared a rebuttal to the study, it took a while before it was published, he said. The “tunageddon” paper by Worm and others, which he said suggested that “all the fish would be gone” by 2048, would have received a grade of “F” in a statistics course, he said.

Kleiber also criticized the way media coverage of mercury in fish scared people, especially pregnant mothers, away from eating fish. He said a subsequent study, which showed that fish are safe to eat if they contain a higher level of selenium than mercury, no matter what the mercury level is, did not receive the same coverage.

“If you feel you’re suffering from mercury poisoning, the best thing to do is get a yellowfin [which has high selenium levels] and eat it,” he said.

In the middle of these complaints, Klieber showed a picture of a couple of people, including outspoken council critic Keiko Bonk, wearing “Bad Kitty” (referring to council executive director Kitty Simonds) T-shirts and calling for an investigation of the council’s actions. Without directly referring to the people in the picture, Kleiber then talked about how even The Nature Conservancy recognizes that researchers pursuing single-issue advocacy science are in danger of losing their credibility.

In an accompanying report, Kleiber wrote, “Our experience in attempting to rectify the public record by publishing in high impact scientific journals revealed an evident editorial bias favoring ecological disaster stories. That bias in part reflects the growth of the environmental movement in our society and concomitant spread of an ecological political correctitude [sic]. It may also simply reflect journalistic partiality for the greater impact of sensational claims as opposed to sober reality.”

He continued that so-called spinning of science for political ends is widespread and reflects “social and political currents in our society that value spin above truth and fantasy above reality.”

In response to Kleiber’s presentation, Tina Owens of the LOST Fish Coalition testified that government agencies are themselves not above spinning science and that “people have to question both sides of science.”

–Teresa Dawson

Volume 19, Number 6 December 2008