In the Gulf of Maine, a porpoise dies every twelve hours after swimming into an invisible net and struggling until it runs out of breath. Many of New England's gill-netting fishermen have so far avoided implementing a simple solution fishermen on the west coast have been using for many years to prevent cetaceans from becoming entangled in their nets and drowning. At SDTN, all marine life is important to us. Not just because we like watching marine life, and not just because all ocean creatures are part of a healthy ecosystem, but because some of us like to eat fish on occasion, like many of you do. What we want to do is to provide you with the information you need to make the best possible seafood choices - in part, we hope you'll avoid eating fish caught at the expense of porpoises, dolphins, and other non-target species.
Flouting the Law
For more than ten years, fishermen on the West Coast have been using pingers to prevent cetaceans from becoming entangled in their nets. Now, pingers are required in gillnets used along the East Coast, too. But many fishermen plying their trade in the Gulf of Maine and at other East Coast fishing grounds are continually given extensions that allow them to get away with gillnetting minus life-saving pingers.
Pingers are little sound alarms that emit a tone every four seconds to alert cetaceans that nets are in the water. They work very well, and using them is very easy. Citing struggling fish processers and declining profit margins, authorities have failed to enforce a law that is more than a decade old. Since 1990, an estimated 16,000 porpoises have died in New Englanders gillnets. In essence, scientists say, these fishermen are being led to believe that delay and denial can be a way of life.
In an oddly ironic twist, it was a group of New England fishermen who first worked with the scientific community to develop pingers, pushing for their use as an alternative to closing fishing grounds where porpoises were being drowned in nets. The pingers worked, the law requiring their use in gillnets was passed, and disputed fishing areas remained open.
In 1998, the National Marine Fisheries Service required New England's gill netters to use pingers, and porpoise deaths dropped by 95% - in 1994, 2,000 of the animals had died, and in 2001, less than 100 were killed. Then, federal enforcement dwindled and many fishermen simply stopped using the pingers. Worse yet, they frequently ventured into areas that had been closed for the purpose of porpoise protection.
By 2003, about 75% of nets used by New England fishermen had no pingers, and the fishermen kept on encroaching into closed areas. How do we know this? It's because federal observers were on board the fishing vessels and made note. Additional violations certainly went unobserved, and by 2005, there were over 1,000 documented porpoise deaths. In 2008, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine proposed closing additional areas unless compliance improved - but they provided a two year grace period instead of requiring immediate pinger compliance. In 2011, long after the end of that grace period in 2010, less than 50% of observed nets were incompliance, and federal limits on porpoise mortality continued to be exceeded. Those excessive deaths continue.
Fishermen work in public territory, catching fish and other creatures that belong to everyone. Next time you're thinking about buying fish to eat, find out how and where it was caught. Perhaps if we, as a community of consumers, place pressure on the fishing community to abide by laws and take responsibility for their actions, they'll clean up their act. Perhaps if we demand that laws be enforced, authorities will do a better job of looking after our natural resources. There is a simple solution, yet many fishermen are proving that they just don't care. The porpoises - and all of us - deserve better treatment. Long-term ocean health is at stake - not just cetacean wellbeing.