Longliners Chafe at Draft Measures to Protect Endangered Sea Turtles
What the National Marine Fisheries Service had proposed was simply unacceptable to Roger Dang, whose family’s longline vessels make up a significant portion of the Hawai‘i swordfish fleet. He likened it to the NBA limiting LeBron James to just two … Continued
Leatherback Takes in Hawai‘i Fishery Deemed Acceptable in NMFS Proposal
Can the 1,424 adult leatherback sea turtles that ply the western Pacific withstand the losses resulting from their interactions with gear set by the Hawai‘i-based longline fishing vessels that target swordfish? A new “internal and deliberative” draft biological opinion (BiOp) … Continued
Land Board Delays Action on Plan To Move Forward with Water Permits
“Let me first say, what you’re doing is long overdue. It’s something we need to do and it’s taken a long time for us to get to this point,” Stanley Roehrig told Ian Hirokawa of the Department of Land and … Continued
County Planners Embrace Exposure Area, But Face Resistance, Technical Obstacles
For the second legislative session since the state unveiled its Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report, bills based on the report’s recommendations largely failed. Among those were bills that would have forced sellers of real property to disclose whether … Continued
Launch of Seabed Mining Experiment Is Put on Hold for Several Months
The Belgian company Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR) had planned to start small-scale testing last month of a bus-sized tracked robot – 40 feet long, 13 feet wide, and 15 feet high – designed to vacuum up poly-metallic nodules from … Continued
New & Noteworthy: Another Whale Death; Clean Water Act; ‘Aina Le‘a
Another Whale Death: For the second time this year, a Hawai‘i deep-set longline vessel killed a false killer whale while fishing for bigeye tuna. The first incident occurred in January within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone around the state and … Continued