San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Lawsuit aims to shield leatherback sea turtles
Animal protection groups sued the Biden administration Thursday in San Francisco for opening nearly 2,000 square miles of West Coast offshore waters to pot fishers, saying their nets will fatally entangle an already endangered turtle species.
The leatherback sea turtle was classified as endangered in 1970, and its population has been declining by 6% a year, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Turtle Island Restoration network said in their federal court lawsuit.
They said the Dec. 1 decision by the National Marine Fisheries Service to allow sable pot fishing in areas off Oregon and Northern and Central California that had been closed since the early 2000s “increases the risk of leatherback entanglement, injury, and death.”
“It’s horrific that hungry leatherback sea turtles have to navigate a vast maze of fishing pot strings after migrating thousands of miles to California,” Catherine Kilduff, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement announcing the suit. “Leatherbacks are on the verge of extinction, and we can’t let them be killed by commercial fishing gear.”
“With only a couple of thousand adult leatherbacks left in the Pacific, every single leatherback is critical to the survival of the species,” said Todd Steiner, founder of Turtle Island Restoration Network. “Their fate is in our hands, and time is running out.”
The suit contends the action violated the Endangered Species Act, and asks the court to block the agency’s action and order it to reassess the impact of opening the waters.
The National Marine Fisheries Service declined to comment.
Leatherback sea turtles, which weigh as much as 1,500 pounds, migrate 7,000 miles from Indonesia to the West Coast and feed on jellyfish before returning west. Some of their largest foraging grounds are in waters off San Francisco, Monterey County and Fort Bragg, as well as Astoria and Newport, Ore., the animal protection groups said.
Sablefish, a soft-fleshed, bottom-dwelling species, are caught by commercial vessels in tens of thousands of ocean-floor pots connected by long lines.
In a separate case, also filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled in March that the National Marine Fisheries Service had failed to protect endangered Pacific humpback whales off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington when it issued a three-year permit to the sablefish industry in 2021. The agency then agreed to assemble a team by the end of October 2025 to protect the whales from entanglement.
In another whale-protection case, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife agreed in 2019 to limit the duration of the state’s Dungeness crabfishing season, which also uses potentially entangling equipment. That case has led to some use of ropeless fishing gear, also known as “pop-up” gear, which lifts the underwater pots by pressing a button rather than leaving the lines in place.
The Center for Biological Diversity asked the federal agency Dec. 9 to require all fisheries using rope lines to convert to pop-up gear within five years.