Dungeness crab season will end April 8 to protect whales
SAN FRANCISCO — The commercial Dungeness crab season in California will be curtailed to protect humpback whales from becoming entangled in trap and buoy lines, officials announced Thursday.
The state Department of Fish and Wildlife said commercial crabbing will end April 8 for waters between the Mendocino-Sonoma county line and the border with Mexico.
The recreational take of Dungeness crab using traps in those areas will also be prohibited. Recreational crabbers will be able to use other methods, including hoop nets and crab snares.
North of the Mendocino-Sonoma county line to the Oregon border, commercial crabbing will only be permitted to a depth of 180 feet, officials said.
“Aerial and vessel surveys conducted in mid-March show humpback whale numbers are increasing as they return to forage off the coast of California, elevating entanglement risk,” the department said in a statement.
The situation will be reassessed in mid-April.
The commercial crab industry is one of California’s major fisheries. For the past six years there have been delays and prohibitions for the crabbing season, which traditionally begins in mid-November, because of the potential risk to whales.
Humpback whales can get caught in the vertical ropes connected to heavy commercial traps, which they can drag around for months, leaving them injured, starved or so exhausted that they can drown.
Humpback whales migrate north annually from Mexico’s Baja California peninsula where they birth calves. In spring, summer and fall the humpbacks feed on anchovies, sardines and krill off the California coast before heading back south.
SANTA ANA — A Southern California man convicted of killing his mother as a teen
ager was captured in Mexico a week after he walked away from a halfway house, violating the conditions of his probation, authorities said.
Ike Nicholas Souzer, 20, was arrested Wednesday in the coastal city of Rosarito by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Mexican officials, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said. He was returned to California.
During the weeklong manhunt, the District Attorney’s Office described Souzer as dangerous and violent.
Souzer had already served his sentence for stabbing his mother to death in 2017, when he was 13. He was subsequently convicted on a vandalism charge and served a short sentence, then released from custody March 20, prosecutors said.
The judge in that case also sentenced Souzer to two years of probation.
This was the second time Souzer disappeared from a halfway house. In 2022, he was let out of jail and moved to a halfway house in Santa Ana where he removed his electronic monitor and left. He was later captured by police.
Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said Souzer deserved harsher sentences and blamed judges who have handled his cases.
OAKLAND — A former correctional officer at a federal California women’s prison
known for numerous misconduct allegations was sentenced to six years in prison for sexually abusing five inmates, federal officials announced Wednesday.
Nakie Nunley, who supervised inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, becomes the seventh correctional officer sentenced to prison for sexually abusing inmates, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. A 2022 investigation by The Associated Press revealed a cultural of rampant sexual abuse and cover-up at the prison.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement that Nunley “egregiously exploited” his power to abuse inmates and retaliate against those who spoke up.
“As today’s sentence shows, the Justice Department will hold accountable officials who abuse their authority to harm those they are sworn to protect — and will not tolerate retaliation against victims,” Monaco said.
Nunley pleaded guilty last year to four counts of sexual abuse of a ward and five lesser felonies of abusive sexual contact of five women. He also admitted to lying to federal officials who were investigating allegations against him, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
The prison is located about 40 miles east of San Francisco and has more than 600 inmates, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.