The Hawai‘i longline fishing fleet is on the rebound. From a peak of 141 vessels active in its heyday in the early 1990s, it gradually slumped to 100 in 2002, following a federal court ruling that shut down the swordfish fishery to protect endangered sea turtles.
It’s working its way back. In 2003, the number climbed to 110. And in 2004, 125 vessels were active. Many of the vessels have returned after a few years’ stint working waters off the California coast, where they had sought shelter after the closure of the sword fish fishery here. Now that the California swordfish fishery has been shut down – by another federal case over the impact of longliners’ hooks on sea turtles – and the Hawai‘i fishery has reopened, they are once more happy to make Hawai‘i their home base.
And not only are they back, they’re back with a vengeance. In 2004, a record number of hooks – 32 million – was put into the water by the longline fleet. All that effort paid off, with some 142,000 bigeye tunas reeled in – another record shattered.
The fishing industry’s good fortune comes at a cost. In taking the bumper crop of bigeye, the longliners once again hooked more sea turtles than the fleet was allowed, under limits set by the National Marine Fisheries Service in compliance with the federal Endangered Species Act.
As a result, in February, NMFS re-initiated the process known as Section 7 consultation. The name refers to a part of the federal Endangered Species Act that requires any agency permitting an action that puts endan gered species in harm’s way to review the action in light of its impact on the affected animals.
The consultation on the take of turtles is nothing new. Throughout the 1990s until it was shut down in 1999 by court action, the Hawai‘ilonglinefleet regularly exceeded turtle take limits set by NMFS. And just as regularly, the agency responded in a most obliging way by simply resetting the limits according to its scientists’ best estimates of the number of turtles the fleet was anticipated to take, a calculation that was by and large indifferent to the impact of the fishing effort on the turtles’ populations.
In the years following the federal court closure, attention focused on the fishing ef fort directed at swordfish. Their shallow-set lines tended to hang in the water at levels where they snagged endangered leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles. The vessels target ing tuna set their lines far deeper in the water, where turtles were largely out of harm’s way.
Or so it was thought.
The Section 7 consultation was triggered not because of the newly reopened swordfish fishery, but because the deep-set lines of the tuna boats snagged 46 olive ridley turtles, exceeding by 9 the limit of 37 olive ridley takes allowed to the longline tuna fishery under a biological opinion NMFS issued in February 2004. Although the take of olive ridleys ex ceeded the incidental take limits, the takes of green and leatherback sea turtles came close to the number allotted the tuna fleet. The fleet was allowed to take 18 leatherbacks; the esti mated take in 2004 came to 15 (the estimates are based on extrapolations from the takes reported by observers).And the fleet fell short by just one on its take of green turtles: it is allotted 6 and took 5 in 2004.
That does not mean that the swordfish fishery is off the hook – not by a long shot. Under the 2004 biological opinion, that fish ery is allowed to take – that is, to interact with, harm, or kill – up to 16 leatherbacks and 17 loggerhead turtles a year. By the end of the first week in March, with about one-quarter of the allowed swordfish sets permitted to the fleet annually having been made, about half of the allowed take of loggerheads had been taken. And, unlike the regulations governing the tuna fishers’ take of turtles, those for the swordfish fishery require all swordfish fishing to cease within seven days as soon as the take limit is exceeded and remain closed for the rest of the year. According to the NMFS Pacific Islands Regional Office, based in Honolulu, the current rate of the swordfish boats’ interactions with loggerhead turtles “is about three times the projected catch rate.”
“At the current rate, the loggerhead limit could be reached by May,” the office reported at the March meeting of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council.
As of mid-March, however, the only on going consultations were over the tuna fish ery take of turtles. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, In Papua…
In an effort to mitigate the take of turtles by the Hawai‘i longline fleet, the Western Pa cific Fishery Management Council has un dertaken several turtle conservation efforts in nesting or foraging areas of the Southern and Eastern Pacific, under the guidance of a Turtle Advisory Committee convened by the coun cil. Irene Kinan, hired by the council as its turtle conservation coordinator, provided the council with an update on her work at the council’s March meeting.
Most leatherbacks taken by the Hawai‘i fleet are from the Western Pacific population, which is the focus of the council’s leatherback conservation work. Kinan described the work that she is doing with non-governmental organizations in the Indonesia-Papua area. At War-Mon Beach in Papua, Kinan said, a program to reduce poaching on leatherback nests done in cooperation with non-govern-mental organizations resulted in protection of all leatherback nests – more than 2,000 of them –in 2004. In the Kei Islands of Western Papua, the council is working to reduce the harvest of adult leatherbacks. In that area, she reported, the goal was to save 100 animals from being taken by villagers: between No vember 2003 and October 2004, she said, only 29 leatherbacks were taken. At the third leatherback nesting site selected by the coun cil for conservation work – Kamiali, Papua New Guinea – the goal was to protect 1,000 nests from egg harvesting. In 2004, Kinan said, no eggs were taken at any of the nests made by 71 leatherback females.
In Baja California, Kinan is working with Mexican fishers to reduce their bycatch of loggerheads in the halibut gillnet fishery as well as to educate them to stop all directed catch of turtles for local consumption. Fi nally, in Yakushima Island, Japan, the council is supporting efforts to manage loggerhead nesting beaches by protecting them from erosion. More than 16,500 eggs from 140 clutches were relocated at Inakahama Beach, and more than 7,400 eggs from 65 clutches were relocated at Maehama Beach, Kinan said.
All Eyes on Bigeye
Past December, a milestone of sorts was reached when the Western Pacific Fish ery Management Council and the west-coast-based Pacific Fishery Management Council were put on notice that they would need to take steps to reduce overfishing of bigeye tuna. The tuna stock was not yet “over fished,” according to the definition in the federal Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conser vation and Management Act, but was “sub ject to overfishing,” the councils were in formed in a letter signed jointly by Bill Robinson, regional administrator for the Pa cific Islands Region of NMFS, and Rodney McInnis, his counterpart for NMFS’ South west Region.
Overfishing occurs when the number of fish caught exceeds what is called the “maximum fishing mortality threshold,” or the amount of fish that can be taken without damaging the fishery’s long-term productivity. By contrast, a fishery is determined to be “overfished” when the total volume of fish dips below the “minimum stock size threshold.” Both thresholds are defined in the fishery management plans adopted by each council.
The Pacific bigeye tuna was identified as being subject to overfishing in NMFS’ annual report to Congress on the status of fisheries in 2003, delivered to Congress in June 2004. The Magnuson-Stevens Act gives councils one year to take remedial action to end the overfishing, meaning that the councils have until June 15, 2005, to implement such action. The Hawai‘i longline fleet’s haul of bigeye accounts for about 5 percent of the total commercial catch of bigeye in the Pacific, with the catch taken by other Hawai‘i vessels (handliners and trollers, for the most part) being no more than one-tenth of the take by the longliners.
The warning from NMFS comes a year after the Hawai‘i fleet first felt the impact of controls imposed under a resolution adopted in 2003 by the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. Under that resolution, both the Western Pacific and Pacific councils had seen regulatory limits imposed to protect stocks of bigeye tuna in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. The actual impact of the cap imposed on the Hawai‘i fleet was minimal: by the time the weight of the catch was determined to reach the limit (equal to the estimated catch made in 2001 in the eastern Pacific), the 150 -ton limit set for the combined Hawai‘i and California longline fleets had already been well exceeded. Keith Bigelow, a scientist with NMFS’ Pacific Science Center, told the coun cil that the total Eastern Pacific catch by U.S. longliners in 2004 was probably 217 metric tons. (But, he added, the IATTC probably was not too concerned about this 44 percent overage, since it is such a small percentage of the total Eastern Pacific catch – about one-quarter of one percent.) Because of lag times in reporting and the additional lead time in advance of closures that result from Federal Register publication requirements, the wa ters east of 150° West latitude were closed to the Hawai‘i fleet for just the last few days of the year. Still, the IATTC cap remains in effect through at least 2006. This year, scientists at NMFS have estimated that the 150-ton limit will probably be reached by August, based on current fishing patterns.
At its March meeting, members of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Coun cil agonized over what to do to comply with NMFS’ demand for action by June. The council’s agenda called for dealing with issues relating to pelagic fisheries (including tunas) on Tuesday, March 15. Discussion and a vote on measures to address overfishing of bigeye were held over to Wednesday, and when no resolution was reached then, action was post poned until mid-day Thursday, the final day of the council meeting.
At that time, the council adopted several recommendations intended to satisfy the NMFS requirement for action. Many of them are exhortative, calling for greater representa tion of the council and the Pacific Islands Regional Office of NMFS on the U.S. delega tions participating in international negotia tions on tuna. One recommendation calls for any international curbs imposed on the Hawai‘i fleet (such as that following the IATTC action) to be done in accordance with the Magnuson-Stevens Act rather than through unilateral NMFS action. (The coun cil was not shy in expressing its pique at the IATTC’s resolution and NMFS implementa tion of it, which took the council by surprise when it was announced late last June.)
On another vote, the council called for a review of the total number of hooks deployed by the Hawai‘i longline fleet, comparing that to the total number that the council esti mated would be deployed when the limited entry program for longliners was set in the early 1990s at 164 vessels. The number of hooks set by the fleet continues to rise, even though the number of vessels in the fleet is nowhere near its peak level. The effective limit on fishing effort that a cap on vessel numbers was thought to represent is under mined if gear technology allows each vessel to put more hooks in the water every time it makes a “set.” For example, in 1991, when 141 longline vessels were active in Honolulu, 12.3 million hooks were set. In 2003, 125 vessels set nearly 32 million hooks.
In yet another action, the council called for additional research on the population of bigeye stocks. If the population of bigeye is one large stock throughout the Pacific, that has implications for management quite dif ferent from what would be appropriate if there were two distinct stocks in the eastern and western regions of the ocean.
The council did take steps to get a better handle on the total catch of bigeye by all Hawai‘i boats when it approved a motion recommending that the handline fishery be more closely monitored. Although this fish ery takes only a small fraction of bigeye tuna caught by Hawai‘i vessels, it has come un der council scrutiny because the handline catch is thought to include a high propor tion of juvenile bigeye tuna, which are often miscategorized as yellowfin. The average weight of a bigeye taken on a longline hook is around 80 pounds, whereas the average weight of one caught by a handline is about 25 pounds. Bigeye tunas are thought to reach sexual maturity at about 50 pounds.
The juveniles seem to congregate with yellowfin at seamounts and at private fish aggregating devices (PFADs), which have been proliferating off the east coast of the Big Island. Among other things, the coun cil is asking NMFS to consider requiring handline vessels to obtain federal permits, keep logbooks, and carry observers, as well as regulating the use and deployment of PFADs, which can be done under Magnuson-Stevens if they are deemed to be fishing gear. At present, the handline boats must have a commercial permit issued by the state if any portion of their catch is sold; otherwise, they are not regulated.
The council also voted in favor of a motion to phase in requirements that all fishers in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (out to 200 miles from shore) be required to provide information on their catch and effort, whether commercial or recreational and regardless of gear type. It also approved language supporting regulation that would make all Hawai‘i fisheries “subject to forms of fishing control where appropriate.”
Fishing for bigeye tuna has jumped dra matically over the last 20 years, driven largely by an insatiable Japanese market. Com pounding the problem is the increasing capture of large numbers of juvenile bigeye by purse seiners, which do not target bigeye but catch them incidentally as they congre gate with other fish at floating logs or man-made fish aggregating devices. While the total take of bigeye by the handline fishery in Hawai‘i is not a significant part of the Hawai‘i catch, the fact that it is made up of mostly juvenile fish gives it a dispropor tionate impact.
Shark Tours Eyed as Fishing Threat
Please be advised that if public hearings are conducted by the Council relating to my
“client’s shark viewing tours, and my client’s business suffers economic damages, appro priate legal action will be taken against the members responsible for such unofficial con duct,” wrote Ken T. Kuniyuki, an attorney representing Joseph Pavsek, owner of North Shore Shark Adventures, in a February 18, 2005 letter to the council.
A few years ago, the state of Hawai‘i banned shark-feeding and –viewing opera tions out of concern for public safety. At the time, such operations were operating in state waters off the North Shore of O‘ahu. After the ban, those operations simply moved from state waters, which extend three miles out from shore, into federal waters. So last year, the state asked the council, which manages fisheries in the federal Exclusive Economic Zone (from three miles out to 200), to regu late the shark viewing companies. Although NOAA legal counsel Judson Feder advised the council that shark viewing is technically not “fishing” and thus does not fall under the regulatory authority of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the council has continued to discuss the issue at its meetings to the “irritation” of the shark tour companies.
Council staffer Tony Beeching told the council in March that he and a state represen tative had recently gone on one of the tours and concluded that there was no real threat to public health. And as far as concerns about altering shark behavior, such as training them to associate humans with food, Beeching noted that the sharks were already there when the boat arrived at its drop spot.
To this, council member Ed Ebisui of Wahiawa, who frequently launches from Haleiwa, said the sharks were already there because the company chums the water in the morning, before the tour goes out. Ebisui had earlier told the council that for years he has fished for opakapaka without being bothered by sharks, but since the shark tour operations began, he now sees sharks frequently.
And despite Beeching’s description of the operation as having minimal health impacts, Feder’s advice and Kuniyuki’s threatening letter, Ebisui argued that the council should move forward with a proposed shark-tagging study for the sandbar and Galapagos sharks that frequent the shark cages, to track the sharks’ movement after the tour boats leave. The study, to be conducted by a student of shark researcher Kim Holland, is expected to cost about $43,000. Ebisui added that instead of looking at sandbar sharks, which aren’t very aggressive, the study should follow the tiger sharks that are occasionally seen around the cages.
— Patricia Tummons and Teresa Dawson
Volume 15, Number 10 April 2005
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