Judge rules for Olema group over sea turtles
A federal judge has sided with an Olema-based conservation group in finding the federal government violated environmental laws including the Endangered Species Act by allowing longline fishing in West Coast waters without assessing threats to endangered sea turtles.
Judge Kandis A. Westmore of the U.S. District Court of Northern California wrote in her ruling late last month that the National Marine Fisheries Service’s issuance of two longline fishing permits earlier this year would “reverse protections in place for leatherback sea turtles despite continuing population declines and the agency’s admission that the extinction of Pacific leatherbacks ‘is almost certain in the immediate future.’”
As part of her Dec. 20 order, Westmore set aside the two fishing permits that were issued in May as well as the agency’s finding that the fishing would have no significant environmental impacts.
Todd Steiner, executive director of the Olema-based Turtle Island Restoration Network, which co-led the lawsuit with the Center for Biological Diversity, said the fishing permits were essentially a back-door attempt by the Trump administration to reopen longline fishing despite a 2004 federal ban. The lawsuit was filed in June.
“We have closed the back door and leatherback sea turtles are safe from drowning on the ends of longline fishing hooks,” Steiner said.
National Marine Fisheries Services spokesman Jim Milbury wrote in an email that the agency is still reviewing the case and does not have comment at this time.
Longline fishing is a method in which a main line spanning up to tens of miles with thousands of hooked branch lines attached to it is placed into the water to catch species such as swordfish and tuna. This type of fishing has been banned since 2004 within 200 miles off the West Coast in large part to protect sea turtles, which can get inadvertently caught on the lines and drown.
Included in this ban zone is about 213,000 square miles of water between Central California and Oregon that was previously designated as a Pacific Leatherback conservation area by the federal government in 2001, according to the court documents.
In May 2019, the National Marine Fisheries Services issued two exempted fishing permits, which allowed two commercial fishing vessels to use longline fishing for up to two years within these waters. These types of permits are issued under certain circumstances, such as limited testing. The Pacific Fishery Man
agement Council, which regulates West Coast fisheries, had recommended to the agency in 2015 to allow testing of longline fishing once again to determine its impacts and ways to prevent them.
The National Marine Fisheries Service drafted a biological opinion in 2018 to assess how this could impact endangered leatherback sea turtles. The review estimated that two female leatherback sea turtles would be hooked or entangled as a result of the new permits, which would
result in the death of one of them. From this review, the agency determined that did not need to conduct a full environmental impact statement and instead issued a finding of no significant impact.
The judge wrote that the agency’s findings contradicted a separate biological opinion it wrote in 2017 on leatherback sea turtles, which found Pacific populations have declined from about 81,000 to less than 3,000 total adults, of which 562 are nesting females. The 2018 biological opinion stated that there are 2,600 nesting females.
In both cases, the agency states it relied on the best available data, which does
not include the years 2012 through the present, according to the court documents. Westmore stated that because agency’s 2018 opinion did not consider its earlier 2017 opinion, it missed an opportunity to clarify its earlier findings and therefore “failed to consider the best available science,” thus violating the Endangered Species Act.
In addition, the judge found that the agency’s finding of no significant impact and its estimation that one turtle would die contradicts the agency’s 2017 biological opinion that stated that leatherbacks are “declining rapidly” and that “every turtle
counts for sustaining and hopefully recovering the population.” The court sided with the environmental groups in finding that a full environmental impact statement should be drafted before fishing permits could be issued.
“In rushing to promote industrial fishing off California, the Trump administration unlawfully brushed aside threats to endangered leatherback sea turtles,” Center for Biological Diversity attorney Catherine Kilduff said in a statement. “Indiscriminate longlines that hook, injure and drown these incredibly imperiled turtles have no place off California’s coast.”