In February 1994, the federal government put in place a program to monitor the fleet of some 125 longline vessels operating out of Hawai`i ports so that scientists might better understand how sea turtles, protected under the Endangered Species Act, are affected by the fishing industry.
At the program’s peak, trained observers, employed by the National Marine Fisheries Service, were on board 10 percent of the fleet that was at sea at any time. Cuts in funding caused NMFS to reduce the program through attrition, so that by mid-1995, observers were on just 5 percent of the vessels at sea.
In August 1995, at the meeting of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council in Honolulu, Hilda Diaz-Soltero, the director of the Southwest Region of NMFS (the region having jurisdiction in U.S. waters in the Pacific), announced that further anticipated cuts in NMFS’ budget would leave no funds at all for the observer program. The observer program, however, is needed to meet the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. To keep the program in place, then, Diaz-Soltero informed the council that the Southwest Region announced its plan to amend federal fishery management rules so that the fishermen themselves would be required to pay the program’s costs.
No Bites
The observer program was accepted grudgingly by most longliners so long as the government was paying for it. However, a number of fishermen and their families (particularly the Vietnamese and Koreans) objected to female observers, citing cultural taboos against having women (especially menstruating women) aboard their vessels. Giving observers bunks on small boats often meant crew members had to sleep on the decks.
Word spread quickly of the NMFS proposal to have the fishermen pay. Sounding the alarm was a flyer (source unidentified) which, under a large “MAYDAY!” headline, summoned the fishermen to the council’s deliberations. According to the flyer, the cost to the individual fisherman could run as high as $20,000 a year — a figure that appears to have been wildly exaggerated.
The flyer drew more than a hundred people — captains, crew, chandlers — to the meeting of the council’s Pelagics Standing Committee on August 8, where the plan was first discussed, and again at the meeting of the full council two days later, when the plan was up for council review.
To no one’s surprise, the testimony of the fishermen was uniformly opposed to NMFS’ proposal. All of them indicated the additional costs — on the order of about $6,000 a year for each vessel in the fishery — would be an unendurable hardship. At least one fisherman announced that if the program were to go into effect, he would bring a class-action suit against NMFS.
Net Profits
The National Marine Fisheries Service is required by law to consider the proposal’s economic impact on the fishermen. As stated in the draft economic analysis prepared by the NMFS Southwest Region, “the proposed action is not likely to reduce gross revenues, and is not expected to result in more than a 2 percent increase in production costs.” Still, the analysis goes on to say, “it is possible that the added cost of the observer program would be great enough to force unprofitable vessels to leave the fishery” or modify their operations substantially.
Tables prepared by NMFS suggest that the owners of medium-sized vessels (47 to 72 feet in length) would be disproportionately hurt by the proposal, with a bite of up to 20 percent of profits. Small vessels would see their profits fall by 17 percent. The largest vessels in the fleet would suffer the least, with profits cut about 12 percent.
Under the present observer program, fishermen must notify NMFS at least 72 hours before they leave port on any scheduled fishing trip. NMFS then may decide to place an observer aboard the vessel for the duration of the trip, in accordance with a sampling plan. Under the new proposal, NMFS would still be notified in advance and would decide whether an observer would go aboard. Observers might still be trained by NMFS — at least initially — but, rather than being NMFS employees, the observers would be hired by a contractor. Fishermen would pay the contractor directly, with the cost estimated to run about $292 for each day an observer is on board. NMFS now reimburses captains up to $20 a day (in most cases) for the costs of providing nutritional meals to observers. Under the new plan, that would be eliminated.
Incidental Takes
The observer program was begun after the National Marine Fisheries Service determined that the number of sea turtles hooked by the Hawai`i-based longline fleet in Pacific waters exceeded the number of “incidental” turtle takes that NMFS had earlier allowed.1 Three of the five turtle species (leatherback, olive ridley, and hawksbill) are classified as endangered, under standards of the Endangered Species Act. Two — the loggerhead and the green sea turtle, which is seen frequently in nearshore Hawaiian waters — are listed as threatened.
Whenever the allowed limit is exceeded, the Endangered Species Act requires reopening what is known as the process of consultation, by which agencies charged with enforcing the act determine how many “incidental” takes of animals classed as endangered or threatened may be allowed before the overall health of the species is harmed. The outcome of that process was to allow up to 849 turtles to be hooked in a 12-month period by the longliners, with up to 129 of those hookings leading to the death of the animal. The limits were based on an estimated fishing effort (defined by the number of hooks set out by the fleet in a year) of 15.4 million hooks.
The limits were further defined by species. A total of 305 loggerheads were allowed to be hooked (with 46 of them killed as a result); for leatherbacks, the numbers were set at 271 (41 killed); olive ridleys, 152 (23 killed); green turtles, 119 (18 killed); and hawksbill, 2 (1 killed).
Renewed Consultation
After the first year of the observer program, NMFS calculated the total number of turtles harmed by the entire longline fishery by extrapolating the rate of turtle hookings seen by the observers to the entire fleet. The observed hooking rate was one turtle for every 15,870 hooks set. (On the average fishing trip, fishermen make many “sets,” each set involving a thousand or more hooks.) When NMFS took the total 12-month fishing effort by the fleet (that is, the total number of hooks set in a 12-month period) and divided it by the observed rate of interaction, the result was that 753 turtles were estimated to have been hooked in the first year of observing. Of those, 89 were thought to have died as a result of the encounter.
Overall, the estimated “incidental” take was under the limits set by NMFS in July 1994, when its most recent biological opinion and incidental take statement were released. (The overall fishing effort was also down: instead of the 15.4 million hooks per year anticipated in the biological opinion, the actual rate for the first 12 months of the observer program was 11.9 million hooks.) For loggerhead turtles, however, the estimated takings exceeded the allowed limits: 442 loggerheads were thought to have been hooked, with 52 of them killed. The observed hookings of loggerheads, in other words, were 45 percent higher than what had been anticipated by NMFS.
These results have led NMFS to reopen the process of biological consultation with respect to the loggerheads — a move that, in August, was criticized by several council members who claimed they were shut out of the process. Under the Endangered Species Act, however, biological opinions are prepared by agencies and, as Diaz-Soltero, NMFS regional director, pointed out, the process is not at all akin to that of making federal rules, where council input is sought.
Self-Monitoring
Among other things, the observer program is a means of determining the accuracy of the turtle interactions reported by the fishermen themselves on required catch report forms. Scientists and statisticians can compare the observed frequency of interactions between fishing gear and turtles to the frequency of such interactions as they are reported by the fishermen.
Such comparisons have left the scientists with little confidence in the fishermen’s reports, however. According to NMFS, the reported rate of turtle hookings is one tenth of the observed rate. As a result, NMFS has decided that the mandatory observer program must be continued.
Small Boats, Big Boats
Almost all of the fishermen protesting the plan to have fishermen pay the observer program costs were from small- or medium-sized longline vessels. These boats, by all accounts, are not the worst offenders when it comes to turtle hookings. They target varieties of tuna, for the most part, and fish almost exclusively during daylight hours.
The larger vessels in the fleet have the highest rate of turtle hookings. These are by and large night-fishing vessels that go after swordfish. At its August meeting, the council did not hear any objections from the captains or crew of these vessels, however. According to knowledgeable people, the swordfish fleet has by and large left Hawaiian waters. While in 1994 there were 53 vessels targeting swordfish, in 1995, the number had dropped to just 15.
The tuna fishermen pointed out to council members that their operations had far less impact on the turtles than did the swordfish fishermen. Their claim is borne out in data collected for the first six months of 1995, a period in which the swordfish fleet was far less active than in earlier years. The observed rate of turtle hookings was one for every 43,000 hooks set — or roughly 37 percent of the hooking rate for the combined tuna and swordfish fleets at full strength.
This led some tuna fishermen to ask the council to devote most of the observers’ attention to the swordfish vessels. For purposes of acquiring valid statistical data, however, all vessels in the longline fleet need to be included in the observer program.
1. For more on this, see the [url=/members_archives/archives1994.php]April 1994[/url] edition of Environment Hawai`i, especially the article “[url=/members_archives/archives_more.php?id=1270_0_30_0_C]Hawai’i Longline Fleet Takes Toll On Endangered, Threatened Sea Turtles[/url].”
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 6, Number 4 October 1995
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