Trump administration declared war on West Coast turtles, dolphins and whales
President Donald Trump’s administration has declared war on California marine animals after an announcement this week from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that erased limits on a number of endangered turtles, dolphins and whales that can be hurt or killed by sword-fishing nets on the West Coast, warn environmentalists.
The limits were backed by environmentalists and the fishing industry, according to Inhabitat. Other protection measures, like better training for fishing boat skippers and sound warnings for creatures to leave the area, have helped reduce the amount of marine creatures that get trapped in the nets, according to NOAA. These measures helped the numbers of
These measures helped the numbers of injuries and deaths in whales to drop from more than 50 in 1992 to one or two every year by 2015 and in dolphins from 400 to only a few.
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However, environmentalists disagree. Todd Steiner, Turtle Island Restoration Network director, believes that the Trump administration has declared war. “The numbers caught per set have not gone down. The California gill-net fishery kills more marine mammals than all other West Coast fisheries combined,” he said.
Rare species are still being killed and the numbers of some species are so small that the death of only one creature can have a major impact, according to Catherine Kilduff, Center for Biological “Government scientists have said that West Coast fisheries can’t catch more than one leatherback every five years. They estimate that four times that have caught just in the gill-net fishery alone,” she told Los Angeles Times.
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