In Brief: The Hawai'i-based fleet of ships that use miles-long lines to catch tuna and swordfish pose a grave danger to turtles and other creatures.

02/15/03

For the past four years, Earthjustice's Hawai'i office has been fighting to save endangered sea turtles from extinction on the hooks of longline fishing boats, and along the way has been helping to change the way our nation's fisheries are managed.

Six of the seven species of sea turtle are now listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Perhaps the most critically endangered is the leatherback, of which there are now only a few thousand adults remaining in the Pacific. Leatherback sea turtles are the largest reptiles on earth, attaining a length of 8 feet and weigh in at about a ton, and they are unique in having no hard shell. They can dive to 3,000 feet and swim at 19 knots -- and do this on a diet of jellyfish. In a 2000 article in Nature magazine, scientists predicted that the leatherback, which has lived on earth for some 200 million years -- before many dinosaurs -- "is on the verge of extinction in the Pacific."

A principal threat to the leatherback and other sea turtles is longline fishing, a method by which boats lay out lines 40 or 50 miles long, carrying hundreds or thousands of baited hooks, which float in the water for hours. In addition to the swordfish and tuna being targeted, these hooks also catch marine mammals, albatross, and sharks, as well as sea turtles, which often either drown or swallow the hook and eventually die.

Throughout the 1990s, the Hawai'i-based longline fishery mushroomed in size, and caught sea turtles by the hundreds. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), responsible for managing fisheries and enforcing the Endangered Species Act, knew that the turtle species were quickly declining but did almost nothing to control the fisheries' ever-increasing impacts, or to search for better fishing methods. In 1999, Earthjustice, on behalf of Turtle Island Restoration Network and The Ocean Conservancy, sued NMFS for violating the ESA and the National Environmental Policy Act. The court declared that NMFS' failure to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for the fishery violated NEPA, and issued and injunction restricted longline fishing throughout some seven million miles of Central Pacific waters. NMFS was forced to prepare its first comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement for the Hawai'i fisheries.

NMFS also issued a new biological opinion under ESA § 7 determining that the fishery was, as we argued, jeopardizing the continued existence of leatherback, loggerhead, and green sea turtles, and consequently NMFS banned all swordfish longlining from Hawai'i and restricted tuna longlining. (Since swordfish longlining had also been responsible for the deaths of thousands of albatross annually, the ban sharply reduced that impact as well.)

The Hawai'i swordfish longline industry has responded to the ban with a vigorous campaign of lobbying and litigation, repeatedly challenging NMFS' conclusion that the industry was helping to drive the turtles to extinction. Under the Bush Administration, agencies' defenses of their actions in the face of industry opposition have been notoriously weak or nonexistent, so Earthjustice has intervened to try to insure that the protections are not lost.

The pressure our work has put on industry has caused NMFS to finally begin aggressively searching for new longlining methods that may be more "turtle safe," and open a dialogue with other nations with longline fleets. Unfortunately, this included recently reopening part of the Hawai'i swordfish longline fishery in the guise of "experimental fishing" that would have illegally continued to kill endangered turtles without much reason to expect discovery of safer fishing methods. Earthjustice went back to court, and NMFS was persuaded to stop the experiment and redesign it. We will continue to insist that the agency strictly comply with its mandate to take all actions necessary to bring these ancient animals back from the brink.

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org