Local fishers in California, US, have won a hard-fought battle against environmentalists working to ban the use of controversial gill nets, which are notorious for snagging unintended victims in their underwater synthetic webs.
A bill in the state Legislature that would have likely shut down a local swordfish and thresher shark drift gill net fishery failed its first committee hearing despite widespread support from ocean and environmental advocates.
Assembly Bill 2019 was killed last week on a 7-6 vote in the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks and Wildlife. Now, state National Marine Fisheries Service officials are considering transferring the fishery (which is in federal waters) to federal jurisdiction. NMFS’s Pacific Fishery Management Council will meet this week to discuss that as well as alternative fishing methods.
Supporters of AB 2019 were as surprised by its failure as members of the fishery, who have long contended with public criticism. Many gill net fisheries have been constrained or entirely shut down across the country, and those that remain are constantly looking for new technologies to reduce the rate of so-called bycatch.
There were quite a few of us that were pretty close to having tears running down our face when the judgment came, said Arthur Lorton, who has fished swordfish off of California since gill nets were permitted in the 1980s. I was very worried about it. If we were shut down, swordfish in restaurants would come from the southern Pacific, where stocks are as healthy and fishing isn’t as scrutinized.
The bill would have required fishers to use direct methods such as harpoons or hand-held hooked lines, but those tools don’t bring in enough of the large fish to sustain the fishery’s annual $14.5 million earnings, said Lorton, who operates a 67-foot steel boat in deep state waters off the coast of Southern California from San Diego to Los Angeles. Most of his catches are sold to Santa Monica Seafood, which has retail shops in Santa Monica and Costa Mesa and also distributes fish throughout the West Coast.
Accidental victims aren’t strangers to Lorton’s nets, he acknowledges. He’s mistakenly nabbed Mola mola, sea lions, dolphins and other species. But, since swordfish and shark fishers began using wider nets and acoustic pingers in the 1990s, their bycatch rates have dropped considerably.
For Oceana and Turtle Island Restoration Network ocean-life advocates who sponsored AB 2019 the fishery’s lower bycatch rates are nothing to cheer.
I’ve been following this fishery for over eight years and, over time, it’s really gone from a horrendous fishery to a horrible fishery, said Ben Enticknap, an Oceana campaign manager and scientist. In the last six years, 61 percent of the catch has been bycatch mostly dead. There’s an average of 100 marine mammals killed per year in this fishery.
Oceana admonished California for having two of the country’s nine dirtiest fisheries, in its March report called Wasted Catch: Unsolved Problems in U.S. Fisheries. The report states that roughly 550 marine mammals were entangled or killed in the drift gill net fishery in the past five years.
Of particular concern for ocean advocates are the dolphins, whales, leatherback sea turtles and sharks that have been unintentionally killed or maimed in the drift gill nets, which are roughly a mile long and are left underwater overnight to snare large ocean fish.
2014 Contra Costa Times