Aquarium fishing: Environmental review required, court rules

The state Monday said it will no longer renew or issue new commercial marine licenses for aquarium fishing without a required environmental review, effective immediately, following a recent state Circuit Court ruling.

On Friday, Judge Jeffrey Crabtree ruled in favor of Earthjustice following a lawsuit filed against the state in January, alleging that the state Department of Land and Natural Resources was violating the law by allowing aquarium fishers to continue extracting hundreds of thousands of marine animals from Hawaii’s reefs without a required environmental review.

“The court is affirming what our clients have been saying all along,” said Earthjustice attorney Mahesh Cleveland, who represented the nonprofits, For the Fishes and the Center for Biological Diversity, and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners Willie Kaupiko, Ka‘imi Kaupiko and Mike Nakachi.

The ruling is a victory for those like “Uncle Willie,” who have been fighting to protect Hawaii’s reefs and fishes for more than 30 years, he said.

It also closes a loophole that existed despite a landmark ruling made by the state’s highest court three years ago that commercial aquarium collection permits should be subject to review requirements under the Hawaii Environmental Policy Act.

DLNR, however, continued to issue marine licenses allowing fishers to collect aquarium fish from Hawaii’s oceans as long as no fine-meshed nets or traps were used, based on its own interpretation. The judge agreed that no commercial take of aquarium fish should be allowed, regardless of the kind of gear used.

The court confirmed what should have been clear in the first place, said Cleveland: that the aquarium pet trade requires thorough environmental review and “not just different schemes to keep doing the same thing.”

“Resorting to new techniques won’t get you off the hook,” he said. “If you want to take fish from our waters to profit from the trade, you need to examine and disclose the environmental impacts first. Anything less would be an injustice to people that rely on healthy and diverse reef ecosystems today, and even more so to our future generations.”

DLNR stopped short of banning aquarium collecting from those with existing licenses — reportedly 41 out of about 3,000 issued — so as not to cause economic hardship to the fishers, their employees and vendors, parti­- cularly during a pandemic.

Cleveland said he was concerned this would give those with existing licenses free rein to take as much as they can before their permits expire, resulting in a “run on the reefs.”

Meanwhile, he noted, the number of reef fish and animals taken from Hawaii’s waters has only increased since the 2017 ruling. The take of yellow tangs, a popular fish harvested in the state, has tripled from Oahu’s waters, he said.

DLNR data showed that the cumulative aquarium catch for 2018, 2019 and the first half of 2020 added up to 537,850 aquarium specimens, surpassing the roughly 507,000 reported in 2017.

“We knew all along that what the state was doing was illegal,” said Rene Umberger, executive director of For the Fishes. “It was just so obvious that the court never meant for hundreds of thousands of animals to continue to be taken for aquarium purposes without environmental review.”

So far, the only review presented for aquarium fishing permits in Hawaii was soundly rejected by the Board of Land and Natural Resources earlier this year.

BLNR cited numerous reasons for the rejection, saying it offered no reasonable estimate on the future take and inadequate discussions on the extreme threat of climate change on the reefs.

What matters most now, Umberger said, is how and whether the law will be enforced. She and other plaintiffs also are putting pressure on commercial airlines to stop transporting illegally caught reef animals for the aquarium trade.

DLNR Chairwoman Suzanne Case said the agency continues to take illegal aquarium fishing seriously and encourages people to keep reporting the illicit activity, which resulted in several high-profile busts this year.

Environmental advocates say the animals targeted by the aquarium trade are primarily herbivorous reef-­dwellers, which play an important role in the coral reef ecosystem by controlling algae growth.

Alert DLNR

Report any suspected illegal aquarium fishing activity to 643-DLNR (3567) or the free DLNRTip app.