Sometime in the mid-1990s, a new type of net began to appear off O’ahu’s Wai’anae Coast. It hung vertically in the water, suspended by floats on the surface and anchored with weights on the seafloor. A virtual curtain of death that could be a mile long and 200 feet deep, the net would catch any fish small enough to poke its head and gills through the net but large enough to be unable to back out.
And not fish only: turtles unlucky enough to be fouled in the netting would often die, with the nets unattended for hours. Coral tangled in the net or the weights that kept it hugging the sea floor would be broken off as the net was hauled in by motorized gear.
The Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Aquatic Resources (DAR) put together a Gillnet Task Force in 1998, whose members included fishermen worried that the new nets were so efficient at removing fish from the water that little was going to be left for those using more traditional means.
In the intervening years, the long, deep-set nets, deployed by converted longline vessels, gradually went out of business when faced with the wrath of the nearshore fishing community. The Task Force changed its focus to take a look at regulation of gillnets with an eye to making them stricter and more easily enforced.
In 2002, ten meetings were held across the state to discuss draft rules reflecting the Task Force recommendations, which did not include an outright ban on their use. At the meetings, however, many in attendance called for such a ban.
In November 2003, the Board of Land and Natural Resources approved yet another series of statewide meetings, this time to discuss a range of options for gillnet management, including a ban. Bill Devick, administrator of DAR, says changes to the administrative rules are “moving ahead,” but there is “still work to be done.”
Gillnets, Round One
The Division of Aquatic Resources went through a similar drill at the beginning of the 1990s. At that time, alarms were sounded over the use of gill nets in nearshore waters. While fishers had used gill nets (also called lay nets) for decades, there had been changes in the construction of the nets as well as marked increases in net users.
In 1992, the Legislature adopted a concurrent resolution asking the DLNR to assess the impact of gillnetting in state waters “and propose regulations to control or restrict the use of gillnets.”
In response to the resolution, the Division of Aquatic Resources delivered a report to the Legislature in 1993 that included an overview of gillnet impacts as well as a plan for phased-in regulations limiting use of the gear.
“Advances in technology are constantly increasing the efficiency of Hawai’i’s fishers,” the report stated. “The replacement of cotton or linen gillnets used by early Hawaiians with monofilament nets (which require less maintenance, bring in larger catches, and are less easily perceived in clear water) has made gillnet fishing much more effective. Because the number of inshore gillnetters has increased over the same period, this fishery has reached the point that regulatory measures will be increasingly important to prevent overfishing.”
In its description of phased-in measures to control use of gillnets, the DAR called for identifying “localized area closures” where gillnetting was thought to have especially harmful effects. Such areas included embayments and estuaries. To achieve this, the division anticipated a process that would involve meetings with stakeholders, scientists, and other members of the public and which would require up to two years to carry out.
A second aspect of regulation would be to increase the minimum mesh size – from the 2-inch minimum to 2 _ or 3 inches. Again, the division warned that this would take time: “Careful planning is necessary to ensure a smooth transition from one mesh size to another,” the report stated, pointing out that a change in the minimum size of thrownet mesh was taking eight years to implement (from 1986, when the rule was adopted, to 1994, when it was expected to be fully adopted).
Third, the division wanted to establish reporting requirements for recreational fishers using nets over a specified length, as had been proposed by the Kane’ohe Bay Task Force. “Fishers using nets over this length should be required to report, regardless of whether or not they sell their catch, since their nets catch enough to have a significant impact on the resource.”
Finally, in this phase, the division proposed “planning for … a net permitting and labeling program. All gillnets used in state waters should be permitted. The permitting process would include labeling of gear, typically by a visibly numbered float and tag system.”
Over the long term, the report said, “studies should be conducted to determine the amount and length of gear that should be allowed to fish in Hawai’i on a regional basis. This entails biological assessments, periodic estimates of resource abundance and determination of gear-specific fishing mortality. All these considerations will be well within the grasp of the DAR in the next few years, through research conducted as part of the MHI-MRI [Main Hawaiian Islands Marine Resources Investigation].”
In 1993, the Legislature (which, until 1999, reserved to itself sole authority for regulating state fisheries resources) responded by reducing the maximum time a gillnet could be in the water (the “soak time”) to four hours, down from the 12-hour limit established in 1977. Also, it required that the net be monitored at two-hour intervals, to so that the capture and death of unwanted or unintended animals, including turtles, could be minimized. A year later, the mesh size was increased to 2-3/4 inches, although the effective date of the regulation was put off until January 1, 1997.
By then, however, the new nets – longer, deeper, and much more efficient – had come onto the scene. Long before the Division of Aquatic Resources completed its plan to regulate the more innocuous (though by no means harmless) gillnets, it was confronted with an even greater challenge.
Gillnets, Round Two
Following the deployment of the longer and more destructive gillnets off the Wai’anae Coast, the Gillnet Task Force was convened and met in 1998 and 1999. The next two years the division spent preparing what it called “a list of discussion items.” In 2002, at a series of meetings across the state, the division took the list to fishers and sought their opinions with questionnaires.
“Following the meetings,” the DAR says in a report it prepared on the subject (available on the DLNR’s web site), “it was noticed that only a few commercial lay net fishers had attended. In order to solicit greater response from them, a new commercial net user survey form was developed and mailed directly to certain commercial marine licensees. We sent 79 surveys to those persons who had reported catching marine life while using either nets in general or gillnets.”
The results of the survey are hardly surprising: when the commercial users are included, support for increased restrictions on gillnet use dropped. Even without the commercial users’ surveys included, 58 percent of the respondents did not support a ban on gillnets, even though 61 percent agreed with the statement that gillnets had a big impact on the inshore reefs.
Because an outright ban on gillnets was not included in the 2002 meetings, in November 2003, DAR asked the Land Board for its approval to hold another round of informal meetings on a new gillnet management proposal that, this time, would include a statewide ban on them as one management option. Among the other options were:
Now, says DAR chief Devick, his division is reviewing the comments from the public meetings and surveys as well as other information on the impact of gillnets. Draft rules are in the works, he says, but there’s no firm timetable for their completion.
How Bad?
The proposal to ban gillnets is based on the notion that they harm fish populations in ways that, over time, will destroy or severely harm the fish. It is a view that enjoys wide support among many fishers. A survey conducted last year by the Hawai’i Fishing News asked its subscribers, most of whom are recreational fishers, “what is your position on gill/lay nets?” Some 85 percent (747 of 848) of readers who responded to the survey supported a ban.
Intuitively, it makes sense to think that gillnets are unselectively destructive of reef animals. But the type of data that would be required to make the case against them is frustratingly difficult to come by. Many gillnet users are recreational fishers and so are not required to report their catches. Studies that might show effects of gillnet use over long periods also require control areas, where gillnets are not allowed. Such studies have not been done.
Still, what evidence is available strongly supports the view that gillnetting is a means of fishing that has the potential to devastate fishing stocks and other reef resources.
Some of it is anecdotal. In 1997, when alarms first sounded over the use of extended, deep-set gillnets off the Wai’anae Coast of O’ahu, longtime fishers described the effects of the longer nets – employed, they said, by newly arrived immigrants from Southeast Asia. One of the oldtimers, akule fisher Carl Jellings, was quoted in the Honolulu Advertiser as saying, “When their nets get hung up, they wrap the end around a wooden tree stump attached to the boat and put the boat in reverse… Either coral heads get ripped up or the lead lines break, leaving ripped net on the ocean bottom.” With the nets made of near-indestructible monofilament line, the net left behind continues to catch and kill fish and other sea life for years.
A year later, another Advertiser article quoted Sparky Kane, an officer with the DLNR’s Division of Conservation and Resource Enforcement, as describing the new, long gillnets as “the most destructive type of fishing I’ve ever seen.”
Those souped-up gillnets, however, have disappeared from Hawai’i waters. Are the gillnets still in use so harmful as to be banned altogether? Past studies are suggestive.
In the 1980s, the Division of Aquatic Resources conducted creel surveys of nearshore fishers at the Waikiki-Diamond Head Fishery Management Area. Creel surveys involve asking the fishers what they’ve caught and what type of gear they have used. Such surveys are not scientifically rigorous, but they do provide insight into relative fish abundance over time.
In its 1992 report to the Legislature, the DAR discussed some of the results of those surveys. In 1985 and 1986, the “creel surveyors began to focus on gillnetters, waiting on shore as long as necessary to obtain an interview when netters returned from fishing. The authors note that in 1986, the number of interviews conducted was relatively small, which “means the catch of any one fisher represents a larger proportion of the total than in other years. In fact, a close examination of the data shows that the majority of gillnet landings registered during the 1986 survey were due to one fisher with about 1000 feet of gillnet who caught over 3,000 menpachi in a single overnight set.”
While total landings “cannot be estimated accurately from creel survey data,” they write, “the huge catch of a single gillnet illustrates the potential for this gear to harvest a much larger proportion of available fish than most other fishing methods.”
And where gillnetting has been banned, catch rates for other gear have often increased. The same 1992 report describes what occurred in Hilo Harbor, where gillnets were banned in 1986. Creel surveys before the ban found that the average fisher caught less than three fish per outing. Three years after the ban was in place, that number was more than seven fish. More than that, the lengths of the fish caught (mostly manini and akule) increased steadily after the ban.
Fishing the Data
Last spring, to buttress calls for a ban on gillnets, former state Health Director Bruce S. Anderson tried to correlate the use of gillnets with declines in commercial fish catches. Anderson, who also was acting director of a group called SHORE (Save Hawai’i’s Ocean Resources and Environment), authored an article in Hawai’i Fishing News that tracked steep declines in commercial catches of o’io, moana, weke, kumu, and moi over the last 50 years, which is when the territorial government began systematic record-keeping of commercial fish catches. At about that same time, Anderson writes, Japanese fishers in Hawai’i began to use monofilament nets. While Hawaiians had used nets, they were made of natural fibers, were visible in the water column, and, if lost or abandoned, would break down over a relatively short time, unlike the nylon monofilament lines.
On the basis of the commercial catch reports – “the best data we have” – Anderson concludes: “our near-shore fisheries resources have been steadily declining over the past 50 years… It is no coincidence that the decline begins at the same time that monofilament gill nets were introduced to Hawai’i.”
Commercial catches of moi (Pacific threadfin) declined from a 1949 high of more than 33,000 pounds to a few hundred pounds in 2003. Commercial catches of bonefish (o’io) plummeted from more than 90,000 pounds in 1949 to about 5,000 in recent years. Data that Anderson provides for other species show similar dismal trends.
The Pacific Fisheries Coalition, a group that includes fishers and conservationists, published a white paper on gillnets last year. In addition to recounting the waste and destruction that accompanies gillnet use, the paper points out the difficulty of enforcing existing regulations:
“Enforcement of the current lay gillnet regulations is very difficult. The state has a total of 39 enforcement officers that are responsible for enforcing fish and game regulations on both land and sea on O’ahu. To catch a gillnetter violating the 2-hour check, 4-hour haul requirement takes over half of one officer’s day.” (With recent cuts in DLNR enforcement staff, effective enforcement of gillnet rules is all the more unlikely.)
Bottom Lines
The economic benefit of allowing gillnets to be employed commercially is not great. According to the Division of Aquatic Resources, in 2002, 52 commercial gillnet fishers landed 129,511 pounds of near-shore fish. The ex-vessel value of the catch (the amount the fishers receive when they sell at auction or to other dealers) came to $239,550. That’s barely a drop in the bucket when it comes to Hawai’i’s total commercial catch, which in recent years has been valued at $40 million or more.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 15, Number 3 September 2004
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