The Turtle Island Restoration Network, Center for Biological Diversity, and KAHEA had sued the National Marine Fisheries Service for allowing 46 imperiled Pacific loggerhead turtles to be hooked last year – the new court-ordered settlement caps the number at 17. This means longline boats must stop fishing for swordfish when 17 turtles are caught.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile the Fisheries Service is weighing whether loggerheads need more protection under the Endangered Species Act.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt made absolutely no sense to have one arm of the Fisheries Service increasing the lethal capture of loggerheads, while the other arm is in the process of determining whether loggerheads should be uplisted from threatened to endangered,\u201d said Todd Steiner, biologist and executive director of Turtle Island Restoration Network. \u201cWith extinction looming, these animals need more protection, not less.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWith this decision, Hawaii’s public-trust ocean resources can be better managed for our collective best interest, and not just the interests of this commercial fishery,\u201d said KAHEA program director Marti Townsend. \u201cThis is a victory not just for the turtles, but for Hawaii’s people who rely on a healthy, functioning ocean ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conservation groups represented by Earthjustice filed a federal lawsuit challenging a 2009 rule allowing the swordfish fleet to catch nearly three times as many loggerhead sea turtles as previously permitted. This settlement freezes the number at the previous cap of 17 while the government conducts additional environmental studies and decides whether or not to classify the loggerhead as endangered, rather than its current, less-protective status of threatened. For leatherback turtles, the bycatch limit remains at 16 per year. In 2010, eight Pacific leatherbacks and seven loggerheads were caught in the longline fishery, according to the Fisheries Service. There have already been four loggerheads captured in 2011, which has sea turtle conservationists concerned.<\/p>\n
\u201cSea turtles have been swimming the oceans since the time of dinosaurs. But without a change in management, they won\u2019t survive our voracious quest for swordfish and tuna,\u201d said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center. \u201cIf loggerheads are going to survive in the North Pacific, we need to stop killing them in our fisheries.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPacific loggerhead sea turtles are nearly extinct, so this bycatch rollback helps right a serious wrong,\u201d said Teri Shore, program director at Turtle Island Restoration Network. \u201cWe can\u2019t allow these rare sea turtles to disappear for a plate of swordfish. It\u2019s tragic that it took a lawsuit to correct this fishery problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A court-ordered settlement means that only 17 Pacific loggerhead turtles can be accidentally hooked by the swordfish industry\u2019s longliners in Hawaii each year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3794,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-3793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3793"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3795,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3793\/revisions\/3795"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3793"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=3793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}