Conservation groups went back to court Thursday in their continuing battle to protect imperiled sea turtles from death and injury in the Gulf of Mexico bottom longline fishery. The groups are suing because the National Marine Fisheries Service’s latest assessment of the fishery’s impact on loggerhead sea turtles is based on incomplete science, so new regulatory measures will fall short of giving the species the protection it needs to survive and recover. The Fisheries Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is responsible for protecting sea turtles under federal law.
The agency recently reopened the bottom longline fishery after a six-month emergency closure designed to stop the capture and killing of sea turtles in violation of the Endangered Species Act. A previous coalition lawsuit, filed in April, had asserted that the Fisheries Service was required to close the bottom longline fishery and address the new data on sea turtle capture in a new biological opinion. The biological opinion, released accordingly in October, analyzed the agency’s plans to reopen the fishery — an action the agency expects will result in the capture of six to seven hundred loggerheads every three years – more than seven times as many animals as the bottom longline fishery was allowed to capture under the previous plan.
The new lawsuit challenges the biological opinion as unlawful and incomplete. “NMFS is continuing to violate the law,” said Steve Roady, an attorney with Earthjustice. “In the teeth of a staggering decline in the population of imperiled sea turtles, the agency has now authorized a huge increase in the number of turtles killed by this fishery. This decision is unlawful and the underlying biological opinion is fundamentally flawed, so we are going back to court.”
Read the complete story at The Center for Biological Diversity.