The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has determined that the Hawaii deep-set longline fleet, which mainly targets bigeye tuna, killed one false killer whale (FKW) and seriously injured another within federal waters in January. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two is the maximum number of FKW mortalities or serious injuries (M&SI) allowed in a calendar year under rules intended to minimize the fleet\u2019s harm to the protected species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the rules, which were recommended by a federal FKW take reduction team several years go, the fleet has struggled to reduce its take of the whales. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because of the two FKW interactions in January, the fleet will lose access to a large swath of fishing grounds south of the Main Hawaiian Islands, known as the Southern Exclusion Zone (SEZ), for the second year in a row. The SEZ spans 112,575 square nautical miles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A teleconference with FKW take reduction team members will be held February 14 to discuss the circumstances surrounding these interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NMFS still has to publish a Federal Register<\/em> notice announcing the closure. According to NMFS staff, the zone will stay closed until at least one of the following criteria is met: 1) The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Assistant Administrator for Fisheries decides, after receiving the team’s recommendations, that reopening is warranted; 2) In the two years following the closure, the fishery has no observed FKW M&SI in the federal waters that are still open;\u00a0 3) It reduces its total M&SI rate by an amount equal to or greater than the rate necessary to reduce M&SI to below the pelagic stock\u2019s potential biological removal (PBR) level; or 4) The recent average M&SI level in the fishery within the open federal waters is below the PBR level for the pelagic stock at that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For further reading: The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has determined that the Hawaii deep-set longline fleet, which mainly targets bigeye tuna, killed one false killer whale (FKW) and seriously injured another within federal waters in January. Two is the maximum number of … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[351],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-10971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-eh-xtra","tag-teresa-dawson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\u201cBigeye Fishery Struggles to Avoid Whale Hookings, Serious Injuries<\/a>,\u201d July, 2018; \u201cWith New Whale Hookings, Longliners Face Fishing Zone Closure<\/a>,\u201d June 7, 2018 EH-XTRA; and \u201cFalse Killer Whale Team Fails to Reach Consensus on New Protection Measures<\/a>,\u201d May 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"