SAN DIEGO (CN) — In an effort to protect endangered loggerhead sea turtles, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced on Thursday that fishing with large-mesh drift gillnets will be prohibited in federal waters off the coast of Southern California from the beginning of June until the end of August.
The announcement was made after officials determined that El Niño weather conditions are happening in Southern California.
El Niño causes a variety of weather effects across the United States — including warmer water in the Pacific and in turn less phytoplankton for fish to eat, disrupting the food chain of sea creatures that eat those fish.
Large-mesh drift gillnets are sometimes miles-long nets used to catch fish like swordfish. They can inadvertently catch other sea creatures like whales, dolphins, sharks and turtles.
The temporary measures are meant to be "proactive and not reactive,” Nicholas Rahaim, spokesperson for the West Coast region of NOAA Fisheries, said of the announced temporary ban.
Loggerhead turtles migrate a lot, and they normally live further south than Southern California, Rahaim said. El Niño conditions make it more likely that they’ll expand their range into the Southern California coasts.
The ban on the gillnets is meant to ensure that the endangered turtles aren’t caught up in large commercial fishing operations, Rahaim added. Other types of fishing will still be allowed in the area.
Even outside these temporary restrictions, the catch-all nature of large-mesh drift gillnets has made them controversial.
In 2022, President Biden signed the Driftnet Modernization and Bycatch Reduction Act as part of a $1.7 trillion federal omnibus spending bill. The act will phase out the use of large-mesh drift gillnets. Even before that, in 2018, the California Legislature passed a bill to stop allowing large-mesh drift gillnets by 2024. (That state law only applies to state waters up to three miles off the coast, whereas the temporary NOAA restrictions cover federal waters from three to 12 miles off land.)
The fed's current temporary prohibition applies to an area off the Southern Californian coast from roughly Point Conception in Santa Barbara County to the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego County. In its announcement, NOAA Fisheries called the area the “Pacific Loggerhead Conservation Area in the Southern California Bight.”
The temporary prohibition could be lifted before August if La Niña conditions reemerge, Rahaim said. In the meantime, environmentalists were celebrating the announcement.
“I’m so relieved endangered loggerhead sea turtles will get this crucial reprieve from entangling fishing nets while they search for food off Southern California,” Catherine Kilduff, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said after the announcement. “Loggerheads already face warming waters and changing habitat in their struggle to survive, and they don’t need the added threat of a deadly fishing net maze.”
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