As per the report loggerhead turtles, long the most abundant U.S. marine turtle, are at risk of vanishing off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. So the federal managers chalked out a plan for the Gulf of Mexico to reduce the number of sea turtles that die from accidental captures in fishing gear.
In the meantime the federal government placed a temporary moratorium on longline fishing in the gulf last April in an attempt to aid the turtle. It is told that the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council is expected to vote today on a new plan that could allow the return of some longline fishers, but with more stringent restrictions on when and where they can work.
Since sea turtles are endangered species the government is under tremendous pressure to ramp up its conservation efforts. It is reported that three environmental groups filed a lawsuit in May in an effort to force federal agencies to upgrade the protective status for loggerheads from threatened to endangered. The issuance of a new federal status report on loggerheads comes partly in response to that lawsuit.
The report states that longline fisheries are the source of “substantial mortality” among juvenile and adult turtles in the ocean. It also lists marine debris, entanglement and ship strikes as increasing sources of turtle mortality. While longlines are singled out, the report says turtles are also killed by other fishing practices, including trawlers, dredgers and traps.
Environmental groups and fisheries managers have been focusing mostly on threats from commercial fishing, particularly longline fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. A federal report last year estimated that longline fishers snared nearly 1,000 sea turtles between July 2006 and December 2008 — well above the permitted rate of 114 per three years.
