US Conservation groups have notified the National Marine Fisheries Service of their intention to sue over its failure to analyse the impacts of shrimp trawling on endangered sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Southeast Atlantic Ocean.
They warn that shrimp trawlers operating in the southeast United States capture and kill over 53,000 threatened and endangered sea turtles each year.
Jaclyn Lopez, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said: “The agency has gotten into a disturbing habit of initiating protections and then stalling them. Every day protections are delayed is another day that these sea turtles face the very real risk of drowning in shrimp nets.”
This new legal action comes two years after the conservation groups settled another lawsuit, one that sought to address more than 3,500 sea turtles that stranded dead or injured on beaches in the same areas in 2011. The Fisheries Service linked many of those sea turtle deaths and injuries to capture in shrimp fishing nets.
Back then conservation groups settled the litigation with the Fisheries Service, which promised to propose a new rule to help protect sea turtles. Instead of implementing the rule, the Fisheries Service withdrew it.
Since then the groups have said that the agency has failed to complete a revised analysis of the impacts of shrimp trawling on sea turtles, even after acknowledging previous analyses were inadequate and did not account for poor compliance with existing regulations.
Conservation groups filing today’s notice include the Center for Biological Diversity, Turtle Island Restoration Network, Sea Turtle Conservancy and Oceana.
