Oceana Nets Comments Favoring Ocean Protection

Environmental News Service ^ | June 6, 2002

[cogitator]

Oceana Nets Comments Favoring Ocean Protection

WASHINGTON, DC, June 6, 2002 (ENS) - The largest number of public comments ever submitted on an ocean related matter was delivered Tuesday to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

Oceana, a new international ocean protection group, submitted the first installment of 60,000 public comments demanding that the federal government enforce current laws designed to halt the destruction of ocean life.

In February 2000, Oceana filed a petition calling on NMFS to implement a program that would count, cap and control wasteful bycatch in U.S. fisheries and fulfill its responsibilities under current laws. Oceana petitioned the agency after releasing a report that estimated that about 25 percent of the world's catch of fish is wasted. NMFS will collect comments related to Oceana's petition through June 17.

"The unprecedented number of comments demonstrates that the public believes that our oceans, and our coastal economies and communities, are at risk from the wanton loss of marine life," said Carolyn Hartmann, Oceana's vice president for policy. "The government needs to act now."

On Tuesday, Hartmann delivered the first installment of more than a dozen large boxes of public comments to Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees NMFS. Oceana delivered the comments in a fishing net to symbolize the 44 billion pounds of fish that are caught as bycatch and wasted each year around the world.

Industrial fishing operations use vast fishing nets that strangle, drown and crush billions of other fish, sea turtles, whales, dolphins and other marine species. Other fishing gears, such as bottom trawls, bulldoze the ocean floor, scraping up everything in their path.

In U.S. waters each year, more than three billion pounds of fish are caught and discarded, about one pound of fish wasted for every four pounds kept. Last year, the U.S. government admitted that 31 fish species in U.S. fisheries are on the brink of commercial extinction, and about 40 percent of all U.S. fisheries are being overfished.

On the East Coast, less than two percent of fishing trips carry scientific observers required to record data on bycatch.

Oceana delivered comments collected through the group's website: http://www.OceansAtRisk.com. Oceana would have preferred to save the reams of paper, but NMFS did not accept e-mail comments for this public comment request.

"We are grateful to Vice Admiral Lautenbacher for accepting the comments in person and for allowing the public to weigh in on this important environmental issue," Hartmann said. "We look forward to working with him in the future to find solutions to the needless waste of marine life and expect the agency to do more to protect oceans."

In the next few weeks, U.S. Congressional committees are planning to vote on bills to amend the nation's principal ocean fish management law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Last month, a House Subcommittee voted on legislation that weakens current law, blocking efforts to rebuild U.S. fisheries to sustainable levels.

[cogitator]

If we want to keep eating fish, we have to come up with better ways to catch them.

[BlueDragon]

Industrial fishing operations use vast fishing nets that strangle, drown and crush billions of other fish, sea turtles, whales, dolphins and other marine species. Other fishing gears, such as bottom trawls, bulldoze the ocean floor, scraping up everything in their path.
This is slander. Remember the dolpin-safe tuna fiasco? American boats had 100% "observer" coverage. At least one person in the employ of National Marine Fisheries, onboard every high-seas tuna seiner. At the time, American tuna boats were the most effecient fish harvesting machines in the world. The had invented "porpoise panels" which were heavy twine, small mesh sections in the middle of the seine near the "cork" line. Once the seine was pursed up (closed at the bottom) the boat would then also "back down", going in reverse. This would allow the cork line to sink, at the fair side of the circled net. For some reason this worked, as the tuna would ussually go toward the boat, and the porpoise would go away from the boat, finding the escape route over the submerged cork-line. I know from personal experience using much smaller salmon seines, that pulling hard upon the net WILL sink the cork-line, on that part of the net farthest away from the boat. The American tuna boats also employed "chase" boats, that they would put inside the enclosed nets, to helap herd the porpoise towards their escape. They would put divers inside the enclosure, too, at times, to help assist with this effort.
The moral of this story?
Americans were still stopped from fishing the tunas with seines---but those from Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, etc., still continued to fish yellowfin tuna "on porpoise", resulting in MUCH HIGHER porpoise mortality than had American boats been allowed to continue.
When I began commercial fishing 25 years or so ago, the U.S. produced 70% and imported 30% of the seafood that this nation consumed. Today, those numbers are fairly reversed. And please also bear in mind, that NMF get's their funding from IMPORTED fish---not domestically produced fish. Fisheries in many other nations, are not nearly so conservation minded or regulated as American fishermen are generally...if we are treated with "zero tolerance" mentality towards potentially harmful side-effects of fishing (which IS increasingly the case), the net results will be more sea mammal mortality, etc., instead of less. Groups like Oceana employ false information as scare tactics, to drum up popular public support for things they have little or no direct knowledge of.
There are many forces at work today attempting to regulate American fisheries out of existence.
When this is accomplished, it will do little more than transfer environmental problems to other nations.
Witness the methods of gold extraction in South America. They use large amounts of mercury...much of it escapes. We don't even mine mercury much in this country anymore.
As with many other "dirty" industries, we export the problem, for we continue to buy from nations that have much less stringent environmental laws than we do. Please keep that in the fore-front of your mind, in regards to Amercan fisherman. We can solve, or at least greatly reduce the problems that actually exist, if given enough time and co-operation.
Fisheries issues are, or can be, very complex. Groups like Oceana, think they have some sort of holy cause. I say, they see only with one eye, and that one half shut!