For the past 50 years, Wild Oceans has used its small size to its advantage when tackling big problems. We begin by identifying issues that need attention and then by doing the necessary background work we develop solutions based on science and build broad coalitions to effect change.
Protecting the Prey Base
Protecting prey fish, the predator fish and fisheries that depend on them, as well as the survival of marine mammals and seabirds, is sound environmental and economic policy. It’s a win for all of us, for wild oceans and the future of fishing.
Download PDFBring Back the Big Fish
By removing too many of the sea’s keystone predators, we weaken an entire tier at the top of the food chain. This may have dire biological consequences throughout the ecosystem, far beyond the social, economic and moral costs of depleted ocean fisheries.
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The Kona Project
The Wild Oceans Kona Project is a multi-year, comprehensive undertaking to improve the understanding of billfish nursery grounds and use this information to champion better protections. The Project has three distinct components consisting of efforts in research, management and education. The Kona Project seeks to inform holistic conservation-based management strategies with the ultimate goal of achieving healthier billfish populations and better fishing opportunities for small boat fishermen and anglers across the Pacific.
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The Florida Forage Fish Coalition
Wild Oceans is also a proud partner in the Florida Forage Fish Coalition. Coalition partners play an important role in supporting, promoting and communicating forage fish research to managers, stakeholders and the general public. Funds raised through the Florida Forage Fish Research Program provide fellowships to graduate students at Florida universities who collaborate with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) to advance our understanding of forage fish. The program produces high-quality research on the value of forage fish to predators and marine habitats, builds collaborative partnerships between academia and FWRI, and fosters the next generation of fisheries scientists.
Billfish Conservation Act Amendment
Congress passes and President Trump signs into law HR 4528, a bill amending the Billfish Conservation Act (BCA) of 2012, which eliminated a sizable component of the global billfish market by banning imports into the U.S. This ‘technical amendment’ clarifies that Pacific billfish exempted from the BCA’s federal no-sale provision are only to be sold locally in Hawaii and Pacific island territories. In effect, it achieves the BCA’s original intent to prohibit the sale of billfish within the mainland U.S. while allowing for a cultural tradition in the islands – the local sale and consumption of billfish – to continue.
Billfish Conservation Act
The Billfish Conservation Act of 2012 was signed by President Obama on October 5th. It effectively bans the importation of all billfish into the continental U.S. and is expected to end the sale of an estimated 30,000 marlin a year. It also helped close the black market for Atlantic-caught billfish. The Act marks the culmination of a united undertaking by a diverse coalition of angling and conservation organizations that Wild Oceans and International Game Fish Association helped mobilize to work in cooperation with a bipartisan group of congressional champions.
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Take Marlin Off the Menu
The Take Marlin Off the Menu campaign was launched in 2008 by NCMC, in partnership with the International Game Fish Association, after we both discovered that the U.S. is the largest importer of billfish in the world. The campaign has informed and educated consumers about the threatened status of marlin worldwide and the dangers of commercial overexploitation, as we work with restaurants and seafood retailers to take the marlin-free pledge and with the compilers of sustainable seafood guides to put marlin on their fish-to-avoid list.
Forage First!
In 2005-2006, NCMC conducted an analysis of three federal FMPs for key forage species in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and Pacific coastal regions. The results were published in our report, Taking the Bait: Are America’s Fisheries Out-Competing Predators for their Prey?, which served to launch our national Forage First! campaign. We made specific recommendations for amending FMPs to explicitly account for and protect a forage base for predators. The report was distributed to all members and staff of the councils as well as national and regional fishing and conservation groups. The report’s author, NCMC executive director Pam Lyons Gromen, spearheaded Forage First! She and Ken Hinman made presentations at council meetings, to other NGOs, and at a series of forage fish workshops on both coasts. The report’s 4-step blueprint for amending forage fish management plans to explicitly account for predator/prey relationships and to prioritize the protection of these relationships over allocation to fisheries was widely adopted by other organizations as a model for implementing forage fish conservation.
Resolution to Protect Pelagic Sargassum
NCMC pushed development of a federal Pelagic Sargassum Plan to forestall commercial exploitation of the pelagic brown algae that provides critical habitat for a host of oceanic species on the continental shelf off the southeastern U.S., as well as to strengthen the position of the U.S. in protecting sargassum as essential habitat on the high seas (Sargasso Sea). Working with the South Atlantic Council, we got a U.S. ban on commercial harvest approved in 2004. The next year, NCMC drafted a resolution to protect sargassum, convinced the U.S. to sponsor it at the 2005 ICCAT meeting, and secured a position on the U.S. ICCAT delegation to shepherd it through the 44-country body.
Menhaden Matter
In 2003 we circulated a petition to curtail industrial netting of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay, ultimately gathering close to 5,000 signatures, and took it to the ASMFC’s Annual Meeting that December. We were invited to present our 9-page paper documenting the decline of menhaden and its effect on predators to the Menhaden Management Board. We urged the Board to begin the process of amending its interstate FMP. The Board referred our technical paper to its scientific advisors for review, with instructions to report back for discussion and consideration of possible action at the next meeting. From there, a series of events was set in motion: NCMC formed Menhaden Matter with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Coastal Conservation Association and Environmental Defense (April 2004); ASMFC held a 3-day scientific workshop to assess menhaden’s ecological status, with emphasis on its role as forage in Chesapeake Bay (October 2004); a motion was made to place an immediate freeze on catch as a stop-gap measure while ecological management goals were developed; ASMFC voted to cap industrial harvest in Chesapeake Bay for five years (August 2005). The cap was a precautionary freeze on fishing for menhaden to prevent any increase in the bay catch which would further jeopardize menhaden and its ecological role, and to give researchers time to look into mounting concerns that the lack of menhaden was harming striped bass on their main east coast spawning ground and what to do about it. During this “timeout,” NCMC led efforts to change menhaden science and management to account for its importance as forage, participating in virtually every subsequent meeting and workshop between 2006 and the present having anything to do with menhaden.
East Coast and Gulf Longline Closures To Minimize Bycatch
In 2000, the National Marine Fisheries Service enacted federal regulations closing 133,000 square miles of U.S. coastal waters to longlining. The chain of events leading to the longline closures can be traced to 1993, when NCMC co-founded the Marine Fish Conservation Network and successfully passed 1996 amendments to the Magnuson Act making bycatch reduction a new mandate. We exhaustively researched longline controls to minimize bycatch and put forth specific recommendations for closing areas of highest bycatch in our 1998 report, Ocean Roulette. When NMFS failed to act, we sued the agency for violating the law and, in a 1999 settlement, secured large closed areas off the southeast coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, closures that reduced bycatch of billfish by up to 75% and are credited with helping restore swordfish to the east coast.
Ecosystem Principles Advisory Panel
NCMC president Ken Hinman was appointed to represent the conservation community on the Ecosystem Principles Advisory Panel (EPAP), assembled by Congress through the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996. In 1999, the panel produced its seminal Report to Congress, Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management, calling on each federal fishery management council to develop a Fishery Ecosystem Plan (FEP) for its region and laying out clear ecosystem principles to guide these plans. As a co-author of the report, Hinman made sure it recommended actions that fishery managers could take in the near-term, recognizing that moving to an ecosystem approach to managing and conserving marine fisheries would be an incremental process. A first step, the report emphasized, would be to consider predator-prey interactions affected by fishing under existing fishery management plans (FMPs).
“Getting Ahead of The Curve” In The Pacific
NCMC invited over 130 fishery experts, scientists, managers, fishermen and conservationists to Monterey, California in November 1996 to discuss the need for greater ocean-wide conservation of large, highly migratory fish in the Pacific Ocean. Trends in the 4 Pacific fisheries revealed fishing for tunas, billfishes and sharks to be increasing and expected to increase into the future. Compounding the threat was the lack of up-to-date and complete information to assess the status of the stocks. Finally, a review of existing Pacific fisheries management organizations exposed multiple gaps – geographic and functional – in the international conservation of these fish. In an attempt to “get ahead of the curve” and head off the widespread overfishing that occurred in Atlantic fisheries, NCMC published the symposium proceedings with recommendations for a cohesive management strategy, including: ratification of the UN Agreement on Highly Migratory Fish Stocks; better coordination among regional fisheries commissions; expansion of treaties to include less commercial species such as billfish and sharks; and the use of multi-lateral trade measures to enforce international agreements.
Shark Conservation, Including A Ban On Finning
In 1993, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), at the urging of NCMC, instituted a Fishery Management Plan for 39 species of Atlantic sharks. The federal plan set catch limits for commercial and recreational fishermen, yet the number of large coastal sharks, already low, continued to drop. An alarming rise in the number of sharks killed just for their fins in U.S. water led us, working with our partners in the Ocean Wildlife Campaign, to successfully persuade Congress to pass the “Shark Finning Prohibition Act of 2000”. However, a loophole allowed U.S. vessels to purchase shark fins on the high seas and land them in U.S. ports. We helped close it with the Shark Conservation Act of 2011, which also strengthens enforcement of the shark finning ban by requiring sharks to be landed with their fins naturally attached. In addition, sanctions can be imposed on nations that have not implemented shark fishing regulations consistent with those placed on U.S. fishermen. U.S. actions to prohibit shark finning have led to similar actions in the international arena.
Ban on the Sale of Atlantic Billfish
The federal plan for conserving Atlantic billfish got underway in 1985, as we worked to include as a primary goal maintaining an abundance of blue and white marlin and sailfish for the recreational fishery. The social and economic value of catch-and-release fishing, which far outweighs any commercial value and has a negligible impact on the stock, argued for a unique approach to managing billfish. On top of that, the incidental catch of billfish in expanding U.S. pelagic longline fisheries, along with an emerging commercial market for marlin in the U.S., made a ban on sale of Atlantic billfish a must. NCMC recognized that taking away the incentive to target or land billfish for commerce was the most effective tool then available to conserve these fish. The no-sale billfish plan became law in 1990, helping protect the future of billfishing in the Atlantic.
International Billfish Symposium
The need for greater global cooperation to conserve wide-ranging species of marlin and swordfish, in the face of equally widespread uncertainty as to the health of these fisheries, led us to sponsor an International Billfish Symposium in 1988 in Kona, Hawaii. The historic gathering of the world’s foremost billfish authorities attracted 160 scientists, managers, conservationists and fishermen from 15 countries. A total of 60 papers were delivered and discussed during the week-long conference, covering trends in the fisheries, the status of billfish populations, research needs and priorities, and management strategies. We published the papers and panel discussions the following year, two hardcover volumes that stood for over a decade as the most complete source of information on billfish. For his work in organizing the five-day conference, NCMC’s Ken Hinman was awarded The Billfish Foundation’s Conservation Award in November 1988.
Amending the Magnuson Act to Regulate Tuna Fishing
Over our objections, the original Magnuson Act excluded tuna in order to justify U.S. tuna boats invading the waters of other nations. But unregulated fishing for tuna off our shores not only put tuna stocks at risk but also inhibited conservation of other big fish, 3 namely billfish, swordfish and sharks, routinely killed in the tuna longline fisheries, whether foreign or our own. NCMC initiated a drive to repeal the tuna exclusion and extend to tuna the same conservation and management benefits afforded all other fisheries under the Act. We testified before Congress and met with staff numerous times. In October 1990, the lawmakers made a dramatic reversal in U.S. policy, giving U.S. managers authority to manage tuna and regulate tuna fishing bycatch.
Atlantic Billfish Fishery Management Plan
The federal plan for conserving Atlantic billfish got underway in 1985, as we worked to include as a primary goal maintaining an abundance of blue and white marlin and sailfish for the recreational fishery. The social and economic value of catch-and-release fishing, which far outweighs any commercial value and has a negligible impact on the stock, argued for a unique approach to managing billfish. On top of that, the incidental catch of billfish in expanding U.S. pelagic longline fisheries, along with an emerging commercial market for marlin in the U.S., made a ban on sale of Atlantic billfish a must. NCMC recognized that taking away the incentive to target or land billfish for commerce was the most effective tool then available to conserve these fish. The no-sale billfish plan became law in 1990, helping protect the future of billfishing in the Atlantic.
Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act
In 1980, NCMC hosted a Striped Bass Symposium primarily to address the role of environmental changes in the disappearance of striped bass. Out of this effort, the NCMC worked with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to develop a plan for striped bass, ultimately leading to the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act of 1984, helping to put the iconic striped bass on the road to recovery.
Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA)
The Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act is the primary law that governs marine fisheries management in U.S. federal waters. First passed in 1976, the MSA fosters the long-term biological and economic sustainability of marine fisheries. Understanding its importance, NCMC founders Chris Weld and Frank Carlton engage with Congressional leaders and NOAA officials to help with the drafting of this landmark legislation.
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