As the United States prepared to send its delegation to the global Our Ocean Conference in Valparaiso, Chile, in late 2015, Caputo said, it would emphasize the importance both of the recommendations set forth by the president’s IUU commission and of cooperative efforts such as OMSI and AMLEP in attacking IUU hot spots around the world.
“We’re trying to close these gaps,” said Caputo, “where we don’t share information, or we don’t have the right jurisdictions, or we don’t have the right assets in the right places. The idea is to try and get everybody together. Everybody in the world today realizes that at-sea enforcement is very expensive. So how do we leverage practices that are in place, and get the most out of them? We have some ideas that we’ll work with our State Department representatives to present at the conference.”
Marine Protected Resources
As important as fisheries are to the U.S. economy – commercial and recreational fisheries contribute more than $30 billion annually – the Coast Guard’s mission to protect marine life goes beyond fish. In coordination with other federal and state agencies, the service enforces resource management and protection regimens for other living species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA); Marine Mammal Protection Act; Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act; and other laws, executive orders, and international conventions.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Rachel Gallagher, a boatswain’s mate aboard the CGC Mellon, works to free a sea turtle in danger off the coast of Central America, Nov. 21, 2014. While on routine patrol, the cutter’s crew came across three sea turtles and a dolphin entangled in more than 100-feet of fishing line and launched a smallboat crew to rescue the animals and recover the debris. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Seaman Sarah Wilson
In recent years, these cooperative efforts have yielded encouraging increases in the number of nests of loggerhead sea turtles – a species that has been under ESA protection for 37 years – along the Atlantic Coast from the Carolinas to Florida. The Coast Guard assists with sea turtle recovery efforts in several ways: First, it helps transport young turtles, hatched in captivity, to their new marine habitat. In July 2015, for example, Coast Guard crews from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, helped ferry marine scientists and volunteers from the Gumbo-Limbo Nature Center offshore to release about 600 sea turtle hatchlings, most of them loggerhead turtles, into the Atlantic Ocean. Second, Coast Guard personnel educate fishermen about the use of turtle excluding devices (TEDs), the trapdoors attached to trawling nets that allow accidentally captured turtles to escape, and enforce the 1987 law requiring all trawlers in U.S. waters to use TEDs.
The Coast Guard also joins partners in helping sea turtles through the “cold-stun” season, explained Assistant Division Chief Steve Tucker, who manages the Coast Guard’s Marine Protected Resources Program (MPRP). When the waters abruptly turn cold in the winter, the turtles, which are cold-blooded, are essentially immobilized and stuck in the current. “There are a number of volunteer groups that patrol the shore and pick them up when they’re cold stunned,” Tucker said. “They rehabilitate them in rehab centers and aquariums, and once they’re healthy again, we sometimes facilitate their release back to sea the following season, or transport them further south, depending on what we have for resources.” During the cold-stun season of 2014-2015, the Coast Guard transported 200 turtles to Orlando, Florida, in an HC-144A Ocean Sentry aircraft, and about 80 more turtles to Gulfport, Mississippi.
“But we’re the only at-sea law enforcement arm for the federal government. For the marine sanctuaries outside state waters and the national monuments, especially the more remote areas, we’re pretty much the only game in town.”
Surveillance flights of Coast Guard aircraft are sometimes useful in tracking the movements of whales – including the world’s most endangered, the northern Atlantic right whale, which currently number only about 400 and are susceptible to being killed by ship strikes or fishing gear entanglements – and Coast Guard cutters or smallboats are sometimes used to transport teams to attempt to rescue whales that are entangled or otherwise in distress. “We can also get a little innovative,” Tucker said. “We have software that creates drift models for search and rescue cases, so if we know the point the whale was last seen, a certain set of coordinates, we can try to estimate, based on currents and weather conditions, where it will likely be found later on.”
As the WWF report and others have made clear, the ability to protect the world’s vulnerable marine species has never been more critical. Nor has it been more of a challenge for the Coast Guard – particularly its MPRP, which has seen its area of responsibility, in the form of newly created marine protected areas, grow by several hundred thousand square nautical miles in the past decade. The Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument, proclaimed by President George W. Bush in 2009 and expanded by President Barack Obama in September 2014, is now the world’s largest marine protected area, covering more than 490,000 square miles.
The Coast Guard’s capacity to enforce laws and regulations within these expanded areas has not increased to match. “Our resources are getting drawn into a number of different directions,” said Tucker. “But we’re the only at-sea law enforcement arm for the federal government. For the marine sanctuaries outside state waters and the national monuments, especially the more remote areas, we’re pretty much the only game in town.”
This article first appeared in the Coast Guard Outlook 2015-2016 Edition.