Fishery Council Sets Sights on Midway
Since taking over management of Midway Atoll in 1996, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been attempting to rid the island of the last vestiges of waste from years of commercial, military, and industrial use. Apart from scientific research, the only permitted use of the atoll is for a small ecotourism operation, run by contractor Midway Phoenix, and occasional refueling stops by military and private charter planes.
But members of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council have visions of Midway as a refueling and trans-shipment station for fishing vessels. At the council’s 110th meeting, held in Honolulu in June, the subject came up repeatedly.
Council executive director Kitty Simonds complained to Rob Shallenberger of the Fish and Wildlife Service that the council had asked to have fishing vessels allowed to refuel and trans-ship at Midway. “We were told it was an incompatible use,” she said, “but refueling does occur for some vessels, at least those owned by the feds.”
Shallenberger responded that requests for any commercial activity are assessed for their risks, including the risk of introducing unwanted species such as rats, accidents, fuel spills, and the like. “We have from the beginning sought to limit the frequency and incidence to vessels supporting refuge activities, mission-related activities,” he said.
“Recently we allowed a fishing vessel to refuel in return for bringing in supplies. Confirming our worst fears, unfortunately, the vessel lost control and ran into the dock.”
“So people aren’t hunting turtle necessarily, but they’re working small nets, recreationally and for personal use. They catch a turtle, look around to see if anyone’s watching, and hmmÉ.” – Ray Sautter
The subject of using Midway arose again during the council’s consideration of David Dieter, a bottomfish fisher, to use the 83-foot-long SS Midway, the supply vessel based at Midway and owned by a subsidiary of Midway Phoenix. Dieter sold his own vessel in 1999. To keep his permit active, however, he is required by council rules to make three trips in the Ho`omalu Zone of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (an area that extends roughly from just west of Necker Island to Hancock Seamount at the western fringe of U.S. territorial water) and land a certain volume of fish. Failing that, he can petition for a waiver of the requirements. For 2000, Dieter received a waiver; for 2001, however, he is seeking to exercise his permit, using the Midway as his vessel, base his operations there, and ship fish, at $1.50 a pound, to Honolulu on Aloha Airlines’ scheduled service.
To do this, Dieter has to receive from the NMFS an exemption from rules that limit the size of vessels to no greater than 60 feet, stem to stern. By law, the NMFS regional administrator is to decide after consultation with the council.
The opinion of other bottomfish fishers was mixed. As summed up by Timm Timmoney, the “initial reaction of bottomfish fishers was very negative É but then I began to think how sour-grapey that was.” If Dieter does get his exemption, he’ll have a huge boat and expenses, she continued. “But the thing that sticks in my craw is access to Midway, especially access to fuel. He could make his three trips in the time it takes me for one trip. That’s pretty serious competition.”
Still, Timmoney and others generally supported Dieter’s request, in hopes that his operation would open the door to Midway for other fishers.
The council endorsed Dieter’s request, but for the 2001 calendar year only. Dieter must still obtain permission from the Fish and Wildlife Service before he can go forward with his plan. In addition, the vessel must be equipped with gear and refrigerators before its first fishing trip.
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Wreck at Midway Suspected Source of PCBs
Rob Shallenberger, director of Pacific Island refuges for the Fish and Wildlife Service, told the council that a wrecked garbage scow and tug have been removed from an area near the landfill, on the south side of Sand Island at Midway Atoll.
The wreck was a favorite haul-out of monk seals. However, tests of sediments and fish taken from the area showed high concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a probable carcinogen in humans that can harm other mammals as well. Results of PCB exposure include low birth weights, slow growth, and neurological damage, among other things.
LeeAnn Woodward, who works on the cleanup of Midway and other Northwestern Hawaiian Islands for the Fish and Wildlife Service, explained how the contamination was discovered. Under terms of the base closure plan, she told Environment Hawai`i, the Navy agreed to post-closure monitoring. “In one of the last go-rounds in collecting fish for monitoring, they came up with PCB spikes in some of the fish around the barge next to the old tug. In doing more sampling, they found very high concentrations in the sediment that centered on tug and barge.”
No obvious source of PCBs existed in the tug, but, Woodward continued, the barge was a different story.
“Unfortunately, this is was a popular haul-out for monk seals,” Woodward said. “Our concern was that the wrecks were attracting seals that would eat fish containing the PCBs.”
“The initial reaction of bottomfish fishers was very negative É but then I began to think how sour-grapey that was.” – Timm Timmoney
The solution was to remove both tug and barge – and the sediment under them, down to bedrock. The removal took several months and was completed in early May. According to Tom Kam, remedial projects manager with the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Pacific Division, said about a thousand cubic yards of sediment were removed.
The barge clean-up is not the last remedial project anticipated at Midway – not by a long shot, says Woodward. “We’re now looking at underground pipes that used to contain fuel and lubricants,” she said. “We need to do some major removal of these.”
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Coral Reef Plan Gets Council OK
Over the objections of environmentalists, the council has approved a fishery management plan for coral reef areas under its jurisdiction.
Most criticisms arose over the fact that the plan ignores a more stringent management plan put in place by the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Reserve council, which has jurisdiction over more than 80 percent of the coral reef areas covered in the council management plan. The reserve was set aside last winter by the Clinton administration.
Speaker after speaker noted that until or unless the present Bush administration takes action to the contrary, the reserve is the law, and when the council ignores it, as it has in its management plan, it is acting outside the law.
And presidential action is exactly where the council’s hopes lie. As early as February 22, the council chair, Judith Guthertz of Guam, wrote Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans, urging him to revise certain features of the reserve, which, Guthertz said, “was hastily created with little to no regard to the input provided by affected users.”
Judson Feder, representing the general counsel’s office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was asked whether the council’s management plan had to reflect that of the reserve. “The fishery management plan need not be in lockstep with the reserve,” he said, “but some provisions in the FMP might not have much significance when overlaid on the reserve management plan.”
Reefs In Need
A study published recently in Science magazine underscores the need for measures to protect Hawaiian reefs. The study, by Australian biologists David Bellwood and Terry Hughes, looked at the relationship between the species richness – numbers of different species – of reef corals and fish and the absolute size of available habitat in an area ranging from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific coast of California.
“Depauperate, marginal sites” – those having relatively low numbers of species – included Hawai`i, the Galapagos Islands, and western Panama. These, Bellwood and Hughes found, are more likely to be vulnerable to major ecosystem changes compared to the higher-diversity locations, which include the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.
(See Bellwood and Hughes, “Regional-Scale Assembly Rules and Biodiversity of Coral Reefs,” Science, May 25, 2001, Vol. 252, pp. 1532-1534.)
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Council Adopts Turtle Conservation Plan
After three years of bloody lawsuits over the impacts of longline fishing on endangered and threatened species of sea turtles, the council has decided now to embrace the cause of turtle recovery. At its June meeting, council members voted overwhelmingly to hold a series of public scoping meetings as part of the development of a what the council described as a “marine turtle conservation assessment.”
The assessment, according to Paul Dalzell of the council’s staff, “would be a document to guide [council] involvement in the recovery efforts for marine turtles, ensure it did not duplicate or ignore other recovery strategies and ensure that it was fully appraised and involved with NMFS recovery plans.” In addition, the council wants to “convene an expert consultation of turtle scientists to provide input on ongoing and planned turtle conservation activities and to assist the council in defining a role for itself in the conservation effort to recover Pacific turtle populations.”
Ultimately, Dalzell said, the objectives are “to restore turtle populations so that cultural takes can resume legally, and fisheries can get out from under the burden of limits due to turtles’ presence.”
Paul Achitoff, the attorney with Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund who has litigated the turtle bycatch issue, was somewhat skeptical of the council’s intention. “If you can’t beat `em, pretend to join `em,” Achitoff said when asked for comment on the plan.
Cultural Takes
For years, council members from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands have been pressing to be allowed permission to take green sea turtles for cultural purposes. The practice almost certainly occurs despite official sanction.
In Hawai`i, so-called “cultural” takes of green sea turtles are also occurring, says the Hawai`i Longline Association, whose members include owners of longline fishing vessels and their suppliers. As an example, they pointed to a case on Kaua`i where a man was pulled over for speeding last November and police found two green sea turtles in the back of his pickup truck, one dead, the other near death. In May, the driver, Daniel Isobe, pleaded guilty to illegally taking a protected species and to a violation of the Lacey Act (the intrastate transport of a protected species). He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
According to NMFS enforcement agent John Reggai, Isobe will probably be credited with 26 days of time off for good behavior, meaning total time served will be about five months.
Still, Reggai said, “six months in custody is a definite win for the government.” He contrasted Isobe’s sentence to the sentences of other turtle poachers, who in past years received fines or, at most, a few days’ of jail time.
Whether Isobe was acting alone or in concert with others remains an unknown. According to Ray Sautter, with NMFS’ enforcement office in Long Beach, California, Isobe, a physically small man, “didn’t get turtles on the back of the truck by himself,” although Isobe never identified any accomplices.
Sautter, who worked in Hawai`i in the 1980s, discounted the idea that a black market for turtle meat exists in the state, but, he added, Hawai`i has “people there from all over the Pacific basin. Many of them in their home countries eat turtle. So people aren’t hunting turtle necessarily, but they’re working small nets, recreationally and for personal use. They catch a turtle, look around to see if anyone’s watching, and hmmÉ.”
Litigation Measures
The HLA seems to think the practice is far more extensive – so much so that it filed notice of intent to sue the Department of Commerce and the state Board of Land and Natural Resources and the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Aquatic Resources over their alleged failure to enforce the Endangered Species Act. The notice, mailed out by HLA’s attorney on June 18, 2001, faults the state agencies for “knowingly and willfully permitting and otherwise administering fishing activity which results in the taking of protected species.”
“We’re tired of being the victim of a jihad by the [NMFS] Office of Protected Species.” – Jim Cook
The Department of Commerce, through its National Marine Fisheries Service, is similarly accused of ignoring the take of listed turtle species by recreational fishers. “To date, NMFS has failed to enforce the ESA and has instead merely ‘encouraged’ the state agencies to comply with the law,” the notice says.
Former council chair Jim Cook – an officer of HLA – announced the notice of intent to sue at the June council meeting. “It’s well known that there’s takes of green sea turtles,” Cook said. “The recreational take numbers in the hundreds.”
The board of HLA was taking the actions “reluctantly,” he added, but it had no recourse. “We’re tired of being the victim of a jihad by the [NMFS] Office of Protected Species.”
This notice of intent to sue over turtles was one of two that the HLA sent out June 18. The second has to do with what the HLA sees as baseless restrictions on fishing activity arising from a biological opinion on the effect of longline fishing on the endangered short-tailed albatross. The HLA claims that because the swordfish-directed longline fishery has effectively been shut down by recent court action (having to do with protection of sea turtles), NMFS is required to reinitiate the Section 7 consultation process with the Fish and Wildlife Service on the impacts of longliners on the protected seabirds. In addition, the HLA claims, the recent biological opinion is “arbitrary, capricious, and not based on the best available scientific information.”
(For the text of the notices, see Environment Hawai`i’s web pages:
Turtle Notice of Intent
Seabird Notice of Intent
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Ebisui Rejoins Council
Attorney Edwin A. Ebisui, Jr., is back on the Western Pacific council as an at-large member. Ebisui is a part-time commercial fisherman and replaces Tom Webster, a commercial longliner whose term expired in July.
Ebisui served on the council from 1987 to 1996 and was its chair for several years. Reappointed as the second at-large member was Frank W. McCoy, general manager and owner of Northwest Fisheries and McCoy’s Icehouse in Pago Pago, American Samoa.
With current members Bryan Ho of Hawai`i and Aitofele Sunia of American Samoa, Ebisui brings the numbers of attorneys on the council to three.
