Fishery Council Narrows Scope of Study on Expanded Longlining Effort in Hawai`i

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 Pacific Fishery Management Council be seeking ways to loosen current federal protections on longlining?

Because, according to the council, new data indicate that those protections are working so well that they can be relaxed without jeopardizing the turtles.

Sea turtle capture rates have declined by 89 percent since the fleet began fishing under federal regulations adopted in 2004 to protect sea turtles. The percentage of turtles that are “deeply hooked” has declined to 15 percent of all hooked loggerheads and zero percent of hooked leatherbacks. Before the regulations went into effect, 51 percent of the sea turtles were believed to have been deeply hooked, a council report states.

Recently, the council sponsored workshops in Hawai`i, in Japan, where the turtles nest, and in Mexico, where hundreds of turtles are killed by fishermen on any given day. The intent of the workshops was to help fishermen better understand how their actions affect endangered sea turtles in their various habitats.

Hawai`i Longline Association member Leland Oldenburg, who attended the workshops, recently told the council, “In the case of the fishery here, we have shown the way.”

With such success, some council members have been calling Hawai`i’s longline fishery a model for the rest of the world. In February, the HLA requested that the National Marine Fisheries Services remove its annual effort limit and raise the caps on turtle interactions, or “takes.” The HLA also asked that what is now an annual cap be changed so that it becomes a three-year limit, with the fishery not having to be shut down until the number of turtle takes reaches three times the current annual limit. Although the council was not ready to endorse the proposal at its March meeting, it did so at its June meeting, where it voted to recommend that NMFS prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement “to examine the potential for increasing swordfish fishing while not jeopardizing threatened and endangered sea turtle populations,” according to a council report.

At its October meeting, the council narrowed the scope of the SEIS so that it will only analyze the effects of changing or eliminating longline fishing effort limits and longline set certificate requirements, and, despite objections from the HLA, of instituting a time or area closure. The SEIS will also include a discussion of hard caps on the incidental take of sea turtles, observer coverage, population assessment methods, and turtle avoidance incentives.

The council plans to select a preliminary preferred alternative next March. NMFS will then prepare a biological opinion on that alternative, and in June or October 2008, the council plans to take final action on a preferred alternative.

Opposition

In months following the council’s June decision, conservation groups slammed the council and NMFS for trying to ease the current restrictions on shallow-set longlining, the type of fishing that targets swordfish and most often involves interactions with turtles.

In an October 4 letter to council chair (and HLA president) Sean Martin, Meghan Jeans of the Ocean Conservancy and Marydele Donnelly of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation urged the council and NMFS to consider lowering – not raising – the current effort cap of 2,120 shallow sets a year.

In their letter, Jeans and Donnelly pointed out that in March 2006, after only three months of fishing, the Hawai`i fleet’s swordfishing effort was shut down after it reached its annual allowable take of 17 endangered loggerhead sea turtles. As of mid-September in 2007, the fleet was just two loggerhead takes shy of being shut down for the rest of the year again.

“According to the HLA proposal…only 2,631 shallow sets have been fished since the May 3, 2004 fishery management regulations became effective. Thus, rather than increasing the effort cap, fishery managers should be looking to lower the effort cap to levels consistent with the amount of fishing in recent years. The level of turtle take…is based on expected fishing effort related to the annual cap of 2,120 shallow sets, and if the turtle take limits, rather than the effort limits, are being reached consistently, then more turtles are being taken than estimated for the approved level of fishing effort,” they wrote.

The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sea Turtle Restoration Project/Turtle Island Restoration Network also weighed in on the pending SEIS. In a September 20 letter to William Robinson, administrator for NMFS’ Pacific Islands region, the center’s Andrea Treece admitted that the marked decline in turtle takes suggests that current protections have been “somewhat effective,” but added, “It does not, however, indicate that more stringent protective measures are unnecessary or that existing measures are no longer necessary. In fact, available data on the status of sea turtle species, especially the Pacific leatherback, show that strong protective measures have never been more critical to ensuring the species’ survival.”

At the council’s October meeting in Honolulu, Dan Polhemus, director of the state Division of Aquatic Resources and the state’s representative on the council, raised concerns about the practice of using only turtle hard caps to dictate whether the fishery should close, when those caps were set by NMFS based on fishing effort. To separate fishing effort from the turtle caps would, in effect, turn the caps into a target, he said.

Newly appointed council member and former state Department of Land and Natural Resources director Peter Young echoed Polhemus’s concerns.

“As Dan Polhemus noted, the caps should not be viewed as a target, but as a limit that should be avoided,” he said.

Both noted that the newly reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs fishing in federal waters, requires fishery councils nationwide to adopt Allowable Catch Levels for each managed species by 2011. Given that the ACLs will eventually limit how much fish can be taken in a given fishery, Young didn’t understand why the council was so eager to increase the number of sets now.

“If we have more sets, that might increase the chance of taking turtles…If we’re not at the [current effort] limit and we have a new way of managing under the MSA, what’s the urgency?” he asked.

Council chair Martin responded that NMFS was only asked to evaluate the possibility of lifting the effort limit. “There is no pre-conceived idea of what the outcome might be,” he said, adding, “The constraint is the attitude of the fishermen who are reluctant to get into a fishery that they may have to get out of quickly.”

Before the council’s vote on the SEIS, Polhemus warned that the Hawai`i longline fleet could, at the end of the process, end up with stricter fishing regulations. “It’s a gamble,” he said.

Council staffer Eric Kingma admitted that the council was taking a “calculated risk” based on positive loggerhead nesting data and the decrease in turtle hookings and deaths.

When the council finally took its vote, Polhemus and Young were the only members in opposition.

When President Bush reauthorized the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act earlier this year, he blessed the council with a new source of money: the Western Pacific Sustainable Fisheries Fund.

The fund was initially established to receive any money the council might receive from agreements granting foreign fishing vessels the right to fish in Pacific Insular Areas, which include Midway, Johnston, Kingman, Palmyra, Jarvis, Howland, Baker, and Wake. While the fund itself is not new, it’s never had any money in it. The council has never supported the idea of promoting foreign fishing and has never entered into any PIA fishing agreements.

But new language inserted into the act this year allows the fund to receive any fines and penalties resulting from violations by foreign vessels in the U.S. exclusive economic zones around Pacific Insular Areas. Last March, the Coast Guard reported that it had captured a foreign purse-seine vessel in the Howland/Baker EEZ and was pursuing penalties of nearly $3 million.

At its October meeting, the council discussed what its staff had in store for that money or any other penalties deposited in the fund. In August, the staff released a draft marine conservation plan outlining how the sustainable fisheries fund should be spent. The plan included 70 projects addressing research and monitoring, media relations and public outreach, protected species management, environmentally sustainable fisheries, and interagency cooperation, among other things. The total cost of the projects came to roughly $5.5 million.

Upon reviewing the list of projects – which ranged from $1,000 to produce video footage for use in television news stories about council-related events to $1 million to identify, develop, and fund fisheries training programs and workshops in seamanship, fishing technology, fish handling and quality, and vessel and gear maintenance – Don Palawski of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service complained that all of the projects seemed Hawai`i-centric and offered little benefit to the PIAs, which the FWS manages.

Council member Dan Polhemus agreed.

“The PIAs are under-managed and under-funded and there is not really much in [the plan] that flows back to the PIAs…If we do go forward with this, the PIAs should get more out of it,” he said.

After discussing the matter with Palawski during a break, council executive director Kitty Simonds said that she would get together with him to address his concerns informally. Palawski added that the NMFS Pacific Island Regional Office would be involved in the talks, as well.

Once a final plan is approved by the council, it must also receive approval from PIRO before the fund can be tapped. The council has yet to establish an executive committee, which will be tasked with produce a report to PIRO on the top ten projects to be funded.

According to PIRO deputy administrator Mike Tosatto, “We have checks in the mail. Once the plan is approved, we can hold an executive meeting.”

“I still have sleepless nights thinking too hard about this.” Paul Dalzell, a fisheries scientist for the council, knows that the 2011 deadline to establish Allowable Catch Limits for fish stocks in the western Pacific is not going to be easy to make.

In reauthorizing the Magnuson-Stevens Act, Congress required all councils to establish fishing caps on all fisheries in federal waters as a way to avoid overfishing.

“Congress is having a no-tolerance policy on overfishing. I expect this will be an agenda item at each council meeting at least until 2010 (when ACLs must be set for fisheries found to be subject to overfishing) or 2011,” Dalzell told the council at its October meeting.

To establish an ACL for a species or group of species, a stock assessment and risk assessment model first must be developed. The council must then decide what is an acceptable risk level, and that decision will then be evaluated by its Scientific and Statistical Committee. The SSC must submit a catch level recommendation to the council, and the council must then determine an ACL that is equal to or less than the SSC’s recommendation.

Council chair Sean Martin asked Dalzell whether NMFS has provided any guidance as to what an acceptable level of risk was. “The East Coast is okay with 50 percent. For lobsters, [the council chose] 10 percent,” Martin said.

Dalzell responded that the general consensus is that 50 percent is “pushing it,” and he offered his own recommendation of about 25 percent.

Like Dalzell, Dan Polhemus, the state’s representative to the council, said he, too, felt the pressure.

“This is a tremendous amount of work. We need to prioritize. 2007 is nearly over and [some] ACLs need to be implemented by 2010. We have 24 months to put [something together]…To figure risk, you usually use the maximum sustainable yield and for some stocks, we don’t have MSY. And how do you decide an ACL without recreational data? This is hitting us right in the eye with regard to data gaps,” he said.

— Teresa Dawson

Volume 18, Number 5 — November 2007