Hawaii FEP - Western Pacific Fishery Council

There is a long history of coral reef fishing in the NWHI. Iverson et al. (1990) found ampleevidence of fishing by the ancient Hawaiians as far north as Necker Island. Starting in the1920s, a handful of commercial boats ventured into the NWHI to fish for shallow anddeepwater bottomfish, spiny lobsters, and other reef and inshore species. Black-lipped pearloysters at Pearl and Hermes Reef in the NWHI were overfished in the late 1920s, and recentsurveys show that stocks have still not recovered, due to lack of suitable oyster shell habitat(Green 1997). From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, there was a large commercial fishery forakule and reef fish around French Frigate Shoals and Nihoa Island.During the 1960s, and as recently as 1978, Asian fleets harvested tuna, billfish, preciouscorals, and groundfish in and around the NWHI using longliners, pole-and-line vessels,draggers, and trawlers. Foreign fishing is now prohibited throughout the archipelago.In recent decades, there has been a notable decline in nearshore fishery resources in the MHI(Shomura 1987). Excessive fishing is considered to be one of the major causes of this decline(Grigg 2002; Harman and Katekaru 1988), coastal construction, sedimentation, and other effectsof urbanization have also caused extensive damage to coral reefs and benthic habitat near thepopulated islands.The majority of the total commercial catch of inshore fishes, invertebrates, and seaweed comesfrom nearshore reef areas around the MHI; however harvests of some coral reef species alsooccur in federal waters (e.g., around Penguin Bank).As illustrated in Figure 18 and Table 19 total catches of coral reef ecosystems species aredominated by bigeye scad and mackerel scad, and variations in their harvests have largely driventhe downward trend observed in the 2000-2005 time period. Other species reported bycommercial fishermen include surgeonfishes, goatfishes, squirrelfishes and parrotfishes. Asdescribed above, because HDAR’s catch forms use reporting grids that do not differentiatebetween State and Federal waters, these data are for all (State and Federal) waters surroundingthe Hawaii Archipelago. Information on the number of fishery participants is unavailable.Coral reef taxa are currently harvested primarily in Hawaii’s state waters. No permits for coralreef fisheries in Federal waters have yet been issued. MHI catches of the ten most commonlyreported coral reef species are presented in Table 19, and their five year average is illustrated inFigure 19. Currently, there are no active coral reef fisheries in the NWHI.121