New York Times - Christopher Pala
Fisheries officials call the marine national monuments unnecessary, and their boundaries are said to be under review by the Trump administration.
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| A snorkeler approaches a school of convict tang fish in the shallow waters of Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. Credit Ian Shive/USFWS |
HONOLULU —
Terry Kerby has been piloting
deep-sea submarines
for four decades, but nothing prepared him for the devastation he
observed recently on several underwater mountains called seamounts in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
“It
was a biological desert,” he said. Where normally fish and crabs dart
about forests of coral and sponges, “all we could can see was a parking
lot full of nets and lines, with no life at all.”
Mr.
Kerby and Brendan Roark, a geographer at Texas A&M University, are
comparing seamounts that have been fished to those in pristine,
protected areas. This month, they surveyed the upper reaches of four
seamounts, one of which, Hancock, lies inside
Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which includes the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
They
knew that the seamounts had been fished by trawlers and coral
harvesters at some point. “But the extent of the devastation and the
huge amount of gear that was abandoned on the bottom were shocking for
both of us,” he said.
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| Left, abandoned trawl nets on the northwest side of the Hancock seamount. Right, lines caught in the craggy terrain of the southeast side of the seamount, just inside the Papahanaumakuakea Marine National Monument. Credit Terry Kerby |
Among the casualties littering the seabed were 10-foot-tall black corals
that can live over 4,000 years, among the oldest forms of life on
earth.
“Allowing fishing in the few protected seamounts left would be a huge mistake,” said Dr. Roark.
It’s a sentiment widely shared among marine ecologists.
The Trump administration is considering rolling back federal protections for
10 national monuments,
including two in the central Pacific. The Pacific Remote Islands
National Marine Monument and the Rose Atoll National Marine Monument
protect the waters around a handful of islands, most uninhabited, to the
south of the Hawaiian Islands.
The
shore reefs of the islands have long been protected from commercial
fishing; the monument designations extended that protection to 50 miles
from shore in some cases and 200 miles in others.
According to a memo
obtained by The Washington Post in September, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has
recommended
that the designations of the Pacific Remote Islands and the Rose Atoll
be amended “to allow commercial fishing.” (A similar recommendation was
made for another marine monument, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts,
off the coast of New England.)
The
memo did not mention the largest marine reserve: Papahānaumokuākea, a
string of mostly uninhabited atolls and reefs that have been largely
undisturbed since World War II. At about 583,000 square miles, it is the
largest protected area on the planet. (Industry officials in Hawaii are
pressing for commercial fishing to be allowed there, too.)
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| By The New York Times | Source: NOAA Fisheries |
Many
scientists see these marine reserves as among the last rich, untouched
ecosystems where they can study the effects of climate change in
isolation from the impacts of overfishing or pollution.
The
fishing industry here in Hawaii sees it differently. A driving force
behind the administration’s reconsideration is an obscure but powerful
quasi-governmental organization called the Western Pacific Fishery
Management Council, or Wespac, based in Honolulu. The council has
jurisdiction over the waters where 140 long-line vessels based in Hawaii
— as well as a handful in American Samoa — fish mostly for tuna and
billfish.
Wespac
has argued that limits on catch, gear and fishing seasons are the best
tools to regulate fishing and to ensure that the Pacific yields the
maximum sustainable harvests. Over the years, the council has strongly
opposed the creation and expansions of each of the marine monuments.
This year, the council has embraced a new slogan: “Make America Great Again: Return U.S. fishermen to U.S. waters.” In a
presentation
to members of the other fisheries councils in February, Wespac
officials claimed the marine monuments “curtailed economic growth” and
“compromised national food security.”
Ray
Hilborn, a fisheries expert at the University of Washington and a
scientific adviser to Wespac, argues that tuna and billfish are highly
migratory and travel in and out of the reserves. “The monuments just
force the fishermen to go farther and spend more fuel to catch the same
fish,” he said in an interview. “It’s a fake protection.”
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| An employee of the United
Fishing Agency places bigeye tuna on a cart after they are unloaded from
a fishing boat in Honolulu. Bigeye tuna is the mainstay of the sushi
market and the principal target of the Hawaii long-line fleet.
Credit
Eugene Tanner/Associated Press |
Asked
whether Wespac sought to reintroduce fishing only in monument waters or
also in near-shore reefs, Kitty Simonds, the longtime executive
director, said in an email that the council also would review “the
management measures that were in place before the monument designation
and may recommend changes.”
The
fishing industry in Hawaii is hardly in trouble, several experts noted.
Indeed, the Hawaii fleet’s bigeye tuna catch has doubled since 2006,
even though half of America’s Pacific waters are now off-limits to
fishing.
Robert
Richmond, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii, pointed out
that the Hawaii fleet filled its yearly quota of bigeye in August this
year, “so they obviously don’t need more space to fish. They’re just
against all protected areas on principle.”
Over
500 million people depend on reefs for protein, Dr. Richmond said, and
they already yield far less than they could if they were sustainably
fished. Reef ecosystems may become even less productive as the ocean
gets warmer and more acidic.
Dr.
Richmond and other scientists also took issue with Dr. Hilborn’s
criticism of marine monuments. They say the reserves serve as havens for
species depleted elsewhere and for populations migrating away from the
Equator, where warming waters are lowering plankton density.
“The
fisheries benefits of marine reserves are now beyond doubt,” Callum
Roberts, a marine conservation biologist at the University of York, said
in an email. “They allow fish populations to grow back and spill fish
into surrounding waters, they pour fountains of offspring into ocean
currents that seed fisheries, and they provide resilience to
environmental shocks.”
The
tools favored by fisheries officials target a few species to the
neglect of others, he added, while “reserve benefits reach entire
ecosystems.”
One
of the islands on Mr. Zinke’s list is Palmyra, an atoll that lies 1,000
miles south of Hawaii and is part of the Pacific Remote Islands
National Marine Monument. The Nature Conservancy has been running a
marine lab there since 2005, the only site with housing and a runway for
small aircraft located in one of the most untouched tropical marine
ecosystems in the world.
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| Coral in the Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.
Credit
Ian Shive/USFWS |
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| Left, a booby chick tries out wobbly legs at Johnston Atoll. Right, a coconut crab scavenges in the jungle at Palmyra Atoll.
Credit
Photographs by Laura Beauregard/USFWS |
With
170 inches of rain a year — compared with 37 in Seattle — Palmyra also
has a dense rain forest where 11 species of seabirds nest. Discoveries
made there include a surprising link between fish and seabirds: a study
found that nesting birds’ droppings carried onto the reef by the rain
stimulated plankton growth that attracted manta rays and other plankton
feeders.
Other
research has shown that the classic picture of a coral reef, with lots
of pretty little fish and a few big ones, is entirely artificial.
Palmyra’s reefs, like those in the other monuments, are dominated by
sharks, snappers, jacks and other top predators, while smaller prey
cower in fear in holes in the coral, a
study found.
So
interconnected are the elements of intact reef communities that
allowing fishing just beyond 12 miles would disrupt the ecosystem, said
Alan Friedlander, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii and
chief scientist of the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas
project.
“You need to keep the fishing as far away as possible, ideally at 200 miles,” said Dr. Friedlander.
Moreover,
the remote locations are difficult to police. Many of the denizens of
intact tropical reefs, like humphead parrotfish and wrasses, are worth
thousands of dollars in Asia, said Dr. Richmond.
“Fishing
them sustainably, as Wespac proposes, would mean traveling very long
distances from Hawaii and taking very few fish,” he said. “It wouldn’t
be economical.” Dr. Richmond predicted that fishing vessels “would poach
the heck out of those islands.”
Daniel
Pauly, a prominent fisheries scientist at the University of British
Columbia, says that given a chance, the value of the bigger reserves
like those around Wake and Johnston atolls and Jarvis Island, which
extend to 200 miles offshore, will increase over time.
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| Dr. Robert Richmond at the Kewalo Marine Lab in Honolulu.
Credit
Kent Nishimura for The New York Times |
Why? Evolution.
Research
by Jonathan A. Mee, a fish geneticist at Mount Royal University in
Calgary, Alberta, suggests that in any large marine reserve, some “lazy”
fish will spend their whole lives inside the boundaries and therefore
will not be caught — and the bigger the reserve, the more fish inside it
will live longer.
This
will raise the number of what scientists call B.O.F.F.s (Big Old Fecund
Females), which produce more eggs and eggs of better quality, further
increasing the density of fish inside the reserve. Dr. Mee believes that
evolutionary selection of a putative “lazy” gene would accelerate the
population growth inside a reserve.
“The bigger the mortality outside the reserve, the faster the population inside will grow,” Dr. Mee said in an interview.
This
would be particularly helpful for bigeye tuna, which is the mainstay of
the sushi market and the principal target of the Hawaii long-line
fleet. The population of bigeye in the central and western Pacific is
now estimated to be 16 percent of its original size.
“Technology
and subsidies have allowed industrial fleets to go farther and farther,
and deeper and deeper, and to deplete stock after stock,” said Dr.
Pauly, who has shown that the global catch is steadily
falling.
“The
only thing standing between these fleets and global depletion are these
big no-take reserves, so this is the time to create more, not to open
up the existing ones to fishing.”
Alex
David Rogers, a conservation biologist and seamount expert at Oxford
University, estimated that worldwide there were about 16,000 seamounts
with summits above 5,000 feet, shallow enough to harbor a rich diversity
of fish and corals. Unfortunately, he said, most have already been
fished.
Still,
those seamounts in the Papahānaumokuākea and Pacific Remote Islands
marine monuments remain mostly pristine, said Chris Yesson, an expert on
ocean floors at the Zoological Society of London.
“Saving
the ones in the American marine monuments is extremely important,
because the NW Pacific is particularly rich in endemic corals and other
marine life,” Dr. Rogers wrote in an email.
Paul Achitoff, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s mid-Pacific office in Honolulu, said many legal scholars had
concluded
that the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to designate and
protect monuments without congressional approval, is a one-way street.
“It
does not allow presidents to remove restrictions or protections from a
previously designated monument,” he said in an interview. “Only Congress
can do that.”
He acknowledged that several presidents had changed monument boundaries and tweaked restrictions without court challenges.
That
may change soon. “If any of the protections to the Pacific marine
monuments are lifted, we will be filing lawsuits, and we expect to win,”
Mr. Achitoff said.
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