Posted 11/18/2011
November 18 brought a double whammy to the longline vessels operating out of Honolulu. The National Marine Fisheries Service announced that, beginning November 27, Hawai`i longline vessels will no longer be allowed to fish for bigeye tuna in waters under the jurisdiction of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission. The date is when NMFS anticipates the Hawai`i fleet will reach its limit of 3,763 metric tons for the year.
Meanwhile, the NMFS Pacific Islands Regional Office shut down the swordfish fishery, which hit its annual limit on interactions with leatherback turtles. At 9:33 a.m., PIRO posted a notice that 16 leatherback interactions had been recorded for the year, triggering the closure.
Both fisheries will be able to resume on January 1, 2012.
Longliners may still catch bigeye in the Eastern Pacific, east of 150 degrees longitude (more than 700 miles east of Honolulu). That area is under the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. While the IATTC does have limits for catches of bigeye by longline vessels, those limits are unlikely to be reached before year’s end.
Certain Honolulu-based boats may continue to take bigeye from the Western and Central Pacific, if they also hold a permit to fish in American Samoa or if they are landed in American Samoa, Guam, or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
For details, see the Federal Register notice of November 18.
The tuna closure is part of a management regime imposed by WCPFC that is intended to reduce catches of bigeye tuna in the region. (Environment Hawai`i has published many articles on this subject over the last few years; see, for instance, the cover article in our January 2011 edition.) The swordfish closure is intended to help the recovery of critically endangered leatherbacks as well as loggerheads, recently found to be endangered in the Pacific.
Leave a Reply