Turtle Bycatch Continues to Frustrate Council Efforts to Reopen Swordfish Fishery

posted in: December 2003 | 0

The setting was appropriate for a gathering of Honolulu’s fishing community. Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant at Kewalo Basin, just down the road from the fish auction house, is a half-century-old landmark on the Kaka’ako waterfront. Not for its diners the romantic Diamondhead silhouette and soothing interior spaces of the upscale John Dominis restaurant at the end of the promontory.

At Fisherman’s Wharf, the views are more muscular. As the sun set on a recent evening, the outlines of darkened longline fishing vessels and charter sport-fishing boats tied up alongside the basin walls were barely visible against the moonless sky. No soft music here but the low moans and creaks of berthed boats.

Inside, the walls bear witness to the taxidermist’s art, with the mounted swordfish, sailfish, tunas, and other denizens of the deep apparently intended to whet the diner’s appetite. Turtle carapaces are mounted like escutcheons in the four corners of the main dining room. Opposite the maitre d’s station, an enormous stuffed green sea turtle reminds guests of a time when turtle was the main ingredient in the soup du jour.

How times change. Among the most important subjects discussed by fishers on this evening in October, at a meeting sponsored by the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, were ways to avoid hooking turtles and seabirds, both now protected by federal laws.

Other topics addressed by council staff, council members, federal and state fisheries managers, and others this evening ranged from the private fish aggregating devices in growing use off the Big Island, to the possible need to license recreational marine fishers, to the status of trophy marlin. The same presentations, and more, were made to the full council during its 120th meeting

Turtle Troubles

Between presentations at the fishers’ forum, council staff awarded door prizes. In addition to such items as emergency flares and waterproof wallets, the premiums included sets of dehooking devices. These devices consist of a two- to three-foot-long metal rod (length depends on the size of the hook to be removed) with a T-bar handle at one end; at the other, the rod terminates in a single corkscrew twist what Chris Boggs, a scientist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Honolulu, describes as a pig-tail.

Council staff stopped short of describing the purpose of the tools as being to remove hooks from turtles caught in longline gear. Yet there was no secret about their intended use. In September, the council approved adoption of rules that would, if given federal endorsement, reopen the swordfish fishery that has been closed to Hawai’i vessels for the last four years. In addition, it would eliminate the annual two-month “southern closure” that affects the entire Hawai’i longline fleet.

In an effort to minimize injury to sea turtles whose protection was the reason the swordfish fishery was closed in the first place the council’s draft rules call for dehookers to be standard equipment on all longline vessels. (Other required conservation measures call for use of mackerel bait on circle hooks, swordfish setting during nighttime hours only, and monetary support for programs that would protect nesting loggerhead and leatherback turtles.)

At the forum, Boggs demonstrated use of the dehooker. Pushing his fist through the opening in the top of a cardboard box that served as a proxy turtle, he blindly attached a fishing hook to an inside box wall. Boggs then placed the dehooker around the trailing line and shoved it into the interior of the box, following the line to the embedded hook. With a quick tug on the line, he jerked out the hook whose barb, now shielded by the curl of the dehooker, was kept from doing further injury to the “box turtle.” Effective? Yes. Gentle? Hardly.

Not all hooked turtles are able to benefit from dehooking. In cases where the hook is deeply embedded, the best fishermen can do is cut the line as close as possible to the animal. Inevitably, some of the hooked turtles die from their injuries, even when hooks and line can be removed.

No ‘Emergency’

In early October, the council issued a book-length “emergency rule package” that sets forth the rationale behind the regulations it proposes. Under the council’s proposal, swordfish fishing could resume at pre-1999 levels until one of the government observers (placed on about 20 percent of the vessels at sea at any given time) observes a turtle to be “deeply hooked.” The number of endangered leatherback turtles predicted to be hooked annually under this scenario is 51, more than five times the 10 that are predicted to be hooked under the current fishing restrictions. Loggerhead hookings would increase nearly eight-fold: from five under the current regime to 39 under the proposed rules.

But the council’s proposal is already under fire. At the time of council action in September, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., had voided the existing rules governing the longline fishery. In early October, she stayed enforcement of her order, giving the National Marine Fisheries Service until April 1, 2004, to adopt new rules.

The council had hoped to present NMFS with a package it would rubber-stamp. But no sooner had it arrived at NMFS headquarters than it was in trouble. On October 17, Bill Hogarth, administrator of NMFS, notified the council that federal law authorized adoption of emergency actions to address “unanticipated events or problems that require immediate attention.”

“The Court’s decision of October 6, 2003, alleviates the emergency situation,” Hogarth continued, going on to ask the council to withdraw its emergency rule package. To meet the April 1 deadline, he said, NMFS would prepare its own “fully fleshed out proposal” by December 1.

At the council’s October meeting, many members expressed skepticism over the agency’s ability to meet that deadline. Roy Morioka, chairman of the council’s standing committee on pelagic fisheries, told his colleagues that his committee’s fear was that NMFS “would not meet the benchmarks” to have new rules in place by the judge’s April 1 deadline. Instead of pulling its plan off the table, the council voted to ask NMFS to hold onto the council proposal as a back-up, in the event NMFS could not have its own proposed rule package in place by December 1.

Throughout November, staff with NMFS Office of Protected Resources and other divisions met frequently with their council counterparts, hoping to work out language satisfactory to both parties. The outcome could not be known by press time.

Meanwhile, in Papua

One of the conservation measures called out in the council’s proposal is support of efforts by non-governmental organizations to protect nesting beaches for leatherbacks in the South Pacific. According to Paul Dalzell, a fisheries biologist on the council staff, the council has already forwarded to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a request for funds to support the work of Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) in protecting two leatherback nesting beaches, one at War-mon Beach in Irian Jaya, another near Kamiali in Papua New Guinea. A third initiative would try to reduce the numbers of adult leatherbacks killed each year off the coast of Irian Jaya by coastal communities there. The cost of protecting the two beaches from poaching has been estimated $75,000 per year, while the reduction of coastal turtle hunts has been put at $20,000 a year. Eventually, protection of the turtle nests is expected to result in about 170 adult turtles added each year to the Western Pacific leatherback population, but it will be a decade or more before the hatchlings that survive will reach maturity. Reduction of the turtle hunts could save 100 leatherback adults annually.

The idea of protecting turtle nesting areas has been endorsed by the private Hawai’i Longline Association, representing owners of vessels in the longline fleet. Jim Cook, an HLA officer and former council chairman, was asked whether HLA itself had provided support to conservation groups working to protect nesting turtles. “Not at this moment,” he replied, “but we fully expect to do something in the future,” probably with WWF, he added. “What we’re looking forward to is to stop spending every cent we collect on litigation,” he said.

Side-Setting Saves Seabirds

When the crew of longliners throw out baited hooks, flocks of hovering seabirds invariably are drawn to the stern of the vessel by the prospect of the avian equivalent of a free lunch. All too often, the birds are snared by the hooks and dragged underwater, where they drown. In the second quarter of 2003, 58 albatross were reported killed in this fashion; the actual number may be several times that.

For the last few years, the council has been working with NMFS staff, the Hawai’i Longline Association, and Eric Gilman of the National Audubon Society on ways to minimize these interactions. In that time, they’ve tried several approaches night-setting of gear, distraction of the birds with offal thrown overboard from another part of the vessel, underwater line-setting chutes, blue-dyed bait with mixed results.

At the 120th council meeting, however, Gilman reported on the latest bird-avoidance technique tested: side-setting of the fishing lines. When the baited hooks are thrown off the side of a vessel outfitted with a “bird curtain” (a pole from which streamers are dangled), the interactions with birds are reduced to practically nothing.

According to the write-up of the study (published in August), side-set gear reduced interactions with albatross by 99 percent, while use of the underwater setting chute reduced interactions by 87 percent. Council member Sean Martin said that already, between six and eight boats in the Honolulu-based longline fleet have changed over to side-setting.

— Patricia Tummons

Volume 14, Number 6 December 2003