October 5, 2012 – NMFS has approved a plan today that allows the Hawaii-based shallow-set longline fishery to capture and kill more endangered sea turtles when targeting swordfish on the high seas of the North Pacific Ocean.
Current regulations allow the fishery to take, each year, 16 endangered leatherback sea turtles and 17 endangered loggerhead sea turtles. The fishery is closed if either of these take limits is reached. Today's final rule approves a 62 percent increase in the allowable take of leatherback sea turtles to 26 per year, and a 100 percent increase in the allowable take of loggerhead sea turtles, up to 34 per year.
“This decision is outrageous”, says Ben Enticknap, Pacific Project Manager for Oceana. “On the one hand the federal government acknowledges Pacific leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles are endangered and that more needs to be done to protect them. At the same time they say it is okay for U.S. fishermen to kill more of them.”
The leatherback sea turtles captured by the Hawaii-based swordfish fishery are from the same western Pacific population that migrates from nesting beaches in Indonesia to protected foraging grounds off the U.S. West Coast. Earlier this year the Fisheries Service designated nearly 42,000 square miles of critical habitat for leatherback sea turtles in ocean waters off California, Oregon and Washington. In September 2011 they upgraded the status of Pacific loggerhead sea turtles from threatened to endangered, meaning that they are at higher risk of going extinct than previously thought.
Seafood.com is a subscription-based website. The article is reprinted with permission.