Earthjustice has filed a lawsuit on behalf of conservationists seeking to protect threatened and endangered marine species from longline fishing operations in the Pacific Ocean.
The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Honolulu, accuses the National Marine Fisheries Service of failing to undertake required evaluations of the effects of Hawaii deep-set longline and American Samoa longline fishing operations on five species of sea turtles, plus sperm whales, scalloped hammerhead sharks and false killer whales.
The plaintiffs are the Conservation Council for Hawai‘i and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner Mike Nakachi of Hawaii island.
A spokesperson for the Fisheries Service in the Pacific Islands Regional Office declined to comment due to the pending litigation.
According to the Earthjustice complaint, the federal agency responsible for protecting endangered and threatened marine species acknowledged four years ago that the longliners were injuring and killing more sea turtles than the service allows under its existing “incidental take limits” — limits on how many threatened or endangered species a fishery can unintentionally catch or harm.
The lawsuit alleges the Fisheries Service has yet to carry out its Endangered Species Act responsibility to ensure that the species in question will survive and recover in the face of the added threats.
Part of the responsibility is completion of formal biological opinions to determine fishing’s effects on threatened and endangered species. Under the law, the opinions are supposed to help guide the agency in identifying measures needed to make sure the imperiled species can survive and recover.
According to the complaint, the Fisheries Service originally said it would complete the opinions in 2019 but has since delayed the completion target dates nearly 10 times.
The lawsuit asks the court to order the agency to conduct the required evaluations within 90 days.
“It’s important to reassess the harm being done so they can either impose new take limits or take any other measures to protect the species,” Earthjustice attorney Ava Ibanez Amador said.
Jonnetta Peters of the Conservation Council for Hawai‘i said she’s frustrated.
“We’ve asked them numerous times to do the (biological opinions), but they keep bumping them back,” she said.
“In the meantime, both fisheries have consistently and significantly exceeded the incidental take limits that the most recent biological opinions established for multiple sea turtle species,” the suit says.
Between 2017 and 2019, according to the suit, the Hawaii deep-set longline fishery injured and killed almost twice the number of green and olive ridley sea turtles allowed under its incidental take limits and continuously exceeded the take limits for loggerhead sea turtles.
During the same time, the American Samoa longline fishery injured and killed green, hawksbill and olive ridley sea turtles well above its incidental take limits.
“These fisheries have exceeded incidental take limits for one or more sea turtle species every single year,” the suit says.
The collateral damage is a result of fishing methods for tuna and other open-ocean fish species that involve laying dozens of miles of baited hooks in the water.
“This indiscriminate fishing method catches, injures, and kills myriad species it is not meant to catch, including every species of sea turtle that roams the Pacific Ocean and numerous marine mammal and shark species,” the lawsuit says.
