About a dozen dolphins were killed near a fish aggregating device off the South Kona coast in August, the National Marine Fisheries Service has reported.
The report, made to the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council at its November meeting in Honolulu, said that the dolphin deaths were brought to the attention of the state Division of Conservation and Resource Enforcement by someone who had witnessed them being shot. NMFS and DOCARE, which is part of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, are investigating the incident.
Mike Gonzales, the new NMFS enforcement officer for the region, also noted in his report that the killing of six green sea turtles on the Big Island last August had been turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s office for prosecution. Suspects in the case are two Kohala men -Herman Keala, Jr., of Kamuela, and Nolan Kimo Perez of Kapa’au who were discovered butchering the animals in an abandoned house near Upolu.
Too late to include in Gonzales’ written report to the council – but included in the council’s discussion of enforcement issues – was the discovery of six green sea turtle carcasses in the Keaukaha area of Hilo in late October. The carcasses had been dumped in a wooded area near the Hilo Yacht Club.
Meanwhile, NMFS has yet to complete work on a biological opinion covering the hookings of sea turtles by the long-line fishery. According to Gene Nitta of the Honolulu office of NMFS, work on the opinion is just about completed and he hopes it will be ready by the year’s end.
Since the sighting earlier this year of a Short-tailed albatross in Hawai’i waters, the council has been under increasing pressure from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NMFS headquarters in Washington to take steps to reduce the catch of albatross by Hawai’i -based longline vessels.
The Short-tailed albatross is globally endangered. The hooking of just three of these birds in Alaskan waters last year was sufficient to cause fishers to fear the federal government would close down the groundfish fishery if nothing were done to reduce the risk of further harm to the species. On the initiative of the fishers themselves, the North Pacific Fishery Council adopted rules requiring boats to employ techniques to reduce bird bycatch. Vessels operating in waters around Antarctica have to use similar techniques, including deployment of so-called Tori poles, hung with streamers, off the stern to scare birds away from the vessel as lines are set.
A Record Year?
So far, 1997 is shaping up to be a record year for bird interactions with the Hawai’i fleet. According to Beth Flint of the Fish and Wildlife Service, observers saw more than 100 Black-footed albatross hooked in the first six months of 1997. Until now, the worst year on record for Black-footed albatross interactions was 1994, where 117 Black-foots were observed to have been hooked.
With a record number of hooks being set fleetwide in 1997, it is likely that 1997 will see a substantial increase in total numbers of albatross hooked by the fleet.
For more than a year, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council has been trying to get fishing vessels in the Hawai’i long-line fleet to adopt voluntarily any of several tried-and-true methods to reduce the catch of albatross. The efforts so far have met with little success. In addition, fishing crews have been provided with bird catch reduction forms they are asked to fill out, again on a voluntary basis. The forms are intended to show not only what techniques are being used, but also how many birds are caught. To date, not one form has been returned to NMFS.
More recently, staff from the council, NMFS and the Fish and Wildlife Service have paid visits to individual boats, hoping to determine what techniques they may employ to reduce bird bycatch. Instead of proposing rules requiring bird-reduction techniques to be employed on the Hawai’i long-line fleet, the council is instead proposing to study the issue further. It has issued a formal request for proposals from scientists proposing to study the effectiveness of various seabird bycatch reduction techniques. The length of the study is proposed to be “at least one year, preferably two.”
Also, the council will be sponsoring a work-shop – tentatively set for August 1998 – to assess the population of Black-footed albatross, one of two species of albatross that have breeding colonies in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. (The other is the Laysan albatross.) About 63,000 breeding Black-footed albatross are thought to inhabit the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, while ten times that number of breeding pairs of Laysan are thought to exist.
If the council awaits the outcome of these studies before it mandates the deployment of bird bycatch reduction techniques in the Hawai’i fleet, it will be 1999 or 2000 at the earliest before Hawai’i long-liners will be forced to take measures to reduce bird bycatch.
Frustration
The problem of albatross by-catch was first brought to the council’s attention more than two years ago, in November 1995. The council’s slow and to date ineffective response has frustrated several conservation groups who have been monitoring the issue. In addition, it has attracted the attention of Rollie Schmitten, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s assistant administrator for fisheries.
In a letter October 30, 1997, to Kitty Simonds, executive director of the council, Schmitten reported he had met with delegations from the American Bird Conservancy, the Audubon Society, and Defenders of Wildlife to discuss the incidental take of seabirds in longline fisheries.”
“During our discussions,” Schmitten continued, “these groups raised concerns about the pace at which this issue is being addressed in the Hawai’i long-line fishery.”
In some recent years, estimates of the number of birds killed by the Hawai`i long-line fleet have been as high as 5,000 (including both Black-footed and Laysan albatross).
Volume 8, Number 6 December 1997