SAVING THE loggerhead sea turtle

Loggerhead sea turtles make some of the longest known journeys of any sea turtle species. Adapted for these lengthy migrations, North Pacific loggerheads have a small shell and an enlarged flipper. Each year they migrate more than 7,500 miles between nesting beaches in Japan and feeding grounds off the coast of Mexico. Along the way, they must navigate past millions of longline hooks set in the world’s oceans.

Ocean-borne longline fishing vessels targeting swordfish and tuna deploy thousands of baited hooks on lines that can extend for more than 60 miles. These hooks catch and kill not just swordfish and tuna but thousands of sea turtles, seabirds, marine mammals and sharks. Gillnet fisheries likewise entangle and drown many of these species, including loggerheads. The Center has repeatedly initiated litigation to curtail commercial fishing practices off the West and East coasts of the United States and in Hawaii. Following one successful lawsuit, longline fishing for swordfish was prohibited along the West Coast. However, once we get relief for the besieged turtles in one location, the National Marine Fisheries Service proposes to reopen these destructive fisheries elsewhere. It’s been a shell game, but we’ll persist until turtles are no longer drowning in commercial fishing gear.

While loggerhead sea turtles are threatened throughout their range, they’re particularly imperiled in the North Pacific Ocean, where they’re geographically isolated and genetically distinct from loggerheads in the Atlantic, Indian and South Pacific oceans. In response to a Center petition, in 2010 the Obama administration proposed to upgrade the status of U.S. North Pacific and Northwest Atlantic loggerheads from threatened to endangered, as well as to list loggerheads around the world as nine separate populations. The Center and allies also sued the Fisheries Service to impel it to protect imperiled sea turtles from the Gulf of Mexico’s longline fishery — and in April 2009 the agency ordered a six-month emergency closure of the fishery. In 2011, after the fishery had been reopened, the BP oil-spill disaster had occurred and a record 322 dead sea turtles were found on Gulf beaches, we and allies filed a notice of intent to sue the National Marine Fisheries Service if it didn’t protect all endangered turtles in the region, including loggerheads, from entanglement and drowning in shrimp trawls. The same year, a judge ruled positively in a separate suit by the Center and allies, calling on the Fisheries Service to protect imperiled sea turtles like loggerheads from death and injury from the Gulf’s bottom longline fishery.