After two years of no commercial lobster fishing in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were hopeful that stocks had recovered enough to allow a normal season this year. But in early August, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council brought the 1994 lobster season to an abrupt halt. As explained to the council at its meeting in August, under the council’s own rules, the data gathered at the end of just one month of commercial lobster harvest (July 1994) indicated that the lobster fishery in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands still had not recovered from the one-two punch of overfishing (in the mid-1980s) and El Nino (early 1990s).
In May, sampling done by NOAA indicated that lobster stocks were healthy enough to allow a catch this year of up to 200,000 lobsters (spiny and slipper lobsters combined). The decision was based on a catch-per-unit effort (CPUE) approaching one lobster for each trap set during in the scientific trip.
By the end of one month of commercial lobstering, 63,000 lobsters had been caught with 75,000 traps set. Those statistics indicated that the CPUE of one lobster per trap could not be sustained. Instead, a much lower catch rate of .85 had been realized.
The catch rate is used as an indicator of the health of the lobster populations. The quota is set according to the catch rate, so that the higher the CPUE, the higher the quota. Had the NOAA scientists obtained a CPUE of .85, the quota for 1995 would have been set not at 200,000 lobsters, but at 20,000. At the end of July, however, more than three times the reduced quota had been caught.
As was explained to the council by its staff, the council’s own rules left it with no choice but to close the lobster season at once.
Still, some council members voiced objections. Timm Timmoney, whose boats participate in the lobster fishery, noted that some fishermen discard slipper lobsters in hopes of catching higher-value spiny lobsters. This practice, she said, could account for a reported catch rate of .85 when in practice the actual catch rates might be much higher. In any event, she said, a CPUE of 1 is not necessary for fishermen to make a profit. Many of them can turn a profit at a catch rate half that, she said.
Timmoney’s protests were to no avail. The council approved, as it had to, the request of staff that it announce the immediate closure of the 1994 lobster season.
Bottoming Out
There was no dissent on the council when it came to discussion of the management by the state of Hawai`i of stocks of its bottomfish, particularly onaga and opakapaka. (For background on this problem, scroll down in the archives to the [url=/members_archives/archives1994.php]March 1994 edition[/url] of Environment Hawai`i.)
The council’s staff reported that the state House of Representatives had adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a task force to investigate management of bottomfish stocks in the Main Hawaiian Islands. The resolution did not make it out of the Senate, however, with fishermen and the state’s Division of Aquatic Resources having objected to it. On May 27, Edwin A. Ebisiu, Jr., chairman of the council, invited DAR Administrator Henry Sakuda and his staff to attend a meeting intended to start planning for the task force. Sakuda’s response, dated June 17, 1994, noted that, “for many unknown reasons House Concurrent Resolution No. 389 [relating to the task force] was not adopted by the senate. It is the Department’s policy not to respond to resolutions adopted by only one body of the legislature, inasmuch as this tells us that there is no agreement from the other. Hence, any action by our department is not encouraged.”
The council was told by its scientific staff that onaga catches in the Main Hawaiian Islands had been in a “red light” condition for five years. Opakapaka catches were right on the borderline of the definition of overfishing.
In addition, the new catch report forms that the state is requiring commercial fishermen to complete are proving — as predicted by council staff — to be a disaster. According to figures provided by the DAR, of 50 fish catch reports submitted from March 1994 to May 1994, just six had been properly filled out. In addition, the reports are a statistician’s nightmare: according to DAR, the statistical clerk who edits the catch report forms spends an average of 45 minutes going through each report. (For more background on the catch report forms, scroll down in the 1994 archives for the [url=/members_archives/archives1994.php]March 1994 edition[/url] of Environment Hawai`i. A table of Opakapaka and Onaga catches is available in the [url=http://www.environment-hawaii.org/members_archives/archives_more.php?id=1264_0_30_0_C]March 1994 Editorial[/url].)
Members of the fishery council were visibly angered at the state’s reluctance to take steps to manage fishing of its bottomfish. William Paty, Sakuda’s former boss who continues to sit on the council, noted that the state was “treading water” as far as the bottomfish were concerned. “How much longer can we do this?” he asked.
Rufo Lujan, council member from Guam, commended the House of Representatives for adopting the resolution, but asked that the council write a letter to the Senate president, stating the need for action by that chamber as well. “We can’t be like Nero, fiddling while Rome burns,” Lujan stated. “If we wait and hope the problem will go away, the only thing to go will be the ehu and onaga.”
Turtle Interactions
As Environment Hawai`i reported in April of this year, the hooking of turtles by the Hawaiian longline fleet prompted the National Marine Fisheries Service in 1993 to review the interaction of the fleet with the turtles under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act. After several months of delay, an observer program went into effect in late February, with 24 longline trips (or roughly 14 percent of the total number of trips taken during that time) observed between February 25 and May 26 of this year.
Turtle interactions were observed on nine of the trips. A total of 15 turtles were either hooked (thirteen) or entangled (two) in longline gear, although no turtle was reported to be mortally injured.
Extrapolating from the admittedly limited number of observed trips, NMFS arrived at an incidental take rate of 0.055 turtles per 1,000 hooks set, which, with an estimated 15.4 million hooks per year set by the longline fleet in Hawaiian waters, translates to 847 sea turtles hooked or entangled in longline gear. Assuming (based on past observations) that 4 percent of the turtles snagged will die before they can be released, NMFS is estimating that 34 turtles a year will be retrieved dead.
Other turtles may be expected to die as a result of ingesting hooks. Using a “post-release mortality rate” of 29 percent (a rate that, NMFS states, is “most likely lower than would be expected in the wild,” but which is based on the best data available), each year 94 more turtles are likely to die from hooking injuries.
Altogether, 849 animals representing five species of endangered or threatened sea turtles are expected to be “taken” in the longline fishery each year, with 129 of them expected to die each as a result of their encounter with longline gear. In late July, NMFS ended its official “biological consultation” with the council, determining that the ongoing operation of the longline fleet, under present rules, poses no jeopardy to any endangered species of turtle. The mandatory observer program, limited though it is, will be continued.
Are Sharks in Trouble?
The 1993 annual report of the pelagic fisheries under the council’s jurisdiction noted that “reported Hawai`i shark landings in 1993 were much higher than previous years. The increase is due to new estimates derived from landings of shark fins.”
Jim Cook, a council member, indicated in the meeting of the Pelagics Standing Committee that his observations bore out the higher estimates of shark catches. “Multi-container loads of shark fins” were being shipped out of Honolulu after being brought to port by domestic boats, Cook said. He suspected the fins had been taken from sharks caught by foreign boats outside the U.S. exclusive economic zone and were then trans-shipped to boats bound for Honolulu, where they were loaded into containers for shipment to Asia. No one with the National Marine Fisheries Service could confirm Cook’s observations.
For Further Reading
A recent edition of the journal Marine Fisheries Review is devoted entirely to articles discussing the fisheries of Hawai`i and U.S.-associated Pacific Islands. Topics addressed include management of deep-water snappers; lobster and shrimp fisheries in Hawai`i; the ecology of inshore fisheries in the Main Hawaiian Islands; the coral fisheries in Hawai`i and other islands; and economic aspects of Hawaiian fisheries.
Marine Fisheries Review is published quarterly by the National Marine Fisheries Service, an agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (itself an agency of the Department of Commerce). Subscriptions cost $7 per year and are available through the Government Printing Office (P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954). The issue on Pacific fisheries is Volume 55, Number 2 (1993).
Volume 5, Number 3 September 1994
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