{"id":12335,"date":"2020-03-31T20:36:32","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T20:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.environment-hawaii.org\/?p=12335"},"modified":"2020-04-01T17:34:12","modified_gmt":"2020-04-01T17:34:12","slug":"wespac-shallow-set-fishery-shrinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/?p=12335","title":{"rendered":"Wespac: Shallow-Set Fishery Shrinks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
A de-hooked loggerhead sea turtle about to be released. Credit: NOAA<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Last year, the number of longline sets targeting swordfish hit a record low of 300, according to Russell Ito of the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center. Only 14 of the 150 longline vessels fishing around Hawai\u2018i last year were shallow-set vessels, he said, and even those later switched their gear to target bigeye tuna, which is what the rest of the fleet does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the main reasons for such little interest in the swordfish fishery is the threat of closure due to interactions with endangered leatherback or loggerhead sea turtles. The fishery is currently limited by a court order to catch no more than 17 loggerheads or 26 leatherbacks in a given year. Within the first month of fishing this year, the shallow-set fleet hooked 12 loggerheads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSea turtle interactions this year ramped up really quickly. I thought it was going to close early, but they\u2019re still under the limit,\u201d Ito said at the council\u2019s March meeting. Even so, he added that there isn\u2019t much interest in catching swordfish under the threat of a fishery closure. \u201cNo one wants to gear up and incur those expenses,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, those former swordfish vessels have contributed to the increase in bigeye tuna fishing effort, which sets far more hooks in the water per set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eric Kingma of the Hawai\u2018i Longline Association said it costs between $10,000 and $15,000 to switch from shallow-set to deep-set gear and takes seven to ten days at the harbor to accomplish. \u201cIt is a substantial cost to go back and forth,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A new biological opinion and incidental take statement on the shallow-set fishery\u2019s impacts on the turtles, issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service last year, proposes relaxing the fishery-wide cap on loggerheads, while restricting even further the allowable takes of leatherbacks. The agency also proposes new trip and vessel limits to restrict the activities of problematic vessels, rather than the entire fishery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The council and fishery representatives have chafed at the proposed new measures, pointing to the service\u2019s own scientists, who have determined that the fishery has a negligible impact on the survival of either species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, those same scientists have pointed out that the turtles face a gantlet of gill-net and foreign fisheries, threats to nesting beaches, and feminization due to rising temperatures, which could ultimately lead turtle populations to crash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are many things we have to consider,\u201d NMFS Pacific Islands Regional Office administrator Mike Tosatto told the council. He did, however, assure the council that his agency would consider the modeling results on the impact Hawai\u2018i longline fisheries have on the turtles in its upcoming biological opinion for the deep-set longline fishery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The council voted later to direct its staff to work with NMFS on obtaining publicly available data on sea turtle interaction rates in foreign fisheries operating in areas overlapping loggerhead and leatherback distributions, and to provide the Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) with a presentation on that work at the next council meeting in June.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also recommended that NMFS include\u00a0a social scientist and an industry representative on its working group regarding turtle protection measures (known as reasonable and prudent measures) for the shallow-set\u00a0fishery. The council\u2019s SSC determined last month that the measures NMFS has\u00a0proposed are not reasonable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

— Teresa Dawson<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, the number of longline sets targeting swordfish hit a record low of 300, according to Russell Ito of the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center. Only 14 of the 150 longline vessels fishing around Hawai‘i last year were shallow-set vessels, he … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[467,8],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-12335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-april-2020","category-fisheries","tag-teresa-dawson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12335","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=12335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}