Fishermen Protest New Bid to Restrict Squid Fleets

California wildlife officials are considering new restrictions to prevent squid-fishing fleets--with their powerful lights that turn night into day--from disturbing rare birds nesting on three islands off the Ventura County coast.

But the proposal before the Fish and Game Commission is drawing protests from fishermen, who see it as part of a broader attempt to close the waters along the Central Coast to fishing. Calling the proposal a threat to their livelihood, they plan to turn out in force today at a meeting in Long Beach, where the commission is slated to take up the matter.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Pete Dupuy, president of the Ventura County Commercial Fishermen’s Assn. “There’s no scientific proof the lights are harming the birds. It’s like getting a splinter in the finger and you cut the finger off. It’s overkill.”

The proposal comes at a time when chilly waters along the Central Coast are teeming with squid. The number of vessels with permits to turn the quarry into calamari and bait has tripled to about 270, but their technique for nabbing the palm-sized delicacies is increasingly under fire.

Each boat carries dozens of giant light bulbs--a pair of vessels can fully illuminate a Little League diamond--to lure squid from the depths so they can be herded into nets. When dozens of the boats congregate around the northern islands in the middle of the night, they resemble a floating city and are visible on clear nights from Newport Beach to Santa Barbara.

The practice has even triggered complaints from officials in Malibu, where residents object to light pollution on the ocean after dark. Scientists for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, National Park Service and UC Davis say the illumination creates an unnatural condition that may be causing three species of rare birds to abandon nests on San Miguel, Santa Barbara and Anacapa islands.

In the past year, more than 125 Xantu’s murrelets have been found dead on Santa Barbara Island, six times more than in the previous year and nearly double the average annual death rate, according to federal scientists. Murrelets are small diving birds that dine on shrimp-like krill. There are only 2,000 pairs in existence on the West Coast, and their numbers have mysteriously declined by 40% since 1977, scientists say.

Anacapa Island is the only breeding site for brown pelicans in California, yet last year half their nests were abandoned and chick mortality was high, despite favorable environmental conditions, according to Frank Gress, marine ecologist at the department of wildlife, fish and conservation biology at UC Davis.

Brown pelicans are an endangered species in the United States, though their numbers have increased significantly elsewhere in the nation.

Other bird species that may be affected include double-crested cormorants and ashy storm petrels. Of the 10,000 pairs of petrels in the world, 40% are found at the Channel Islands, their only habitat on the West Coast, scientists say.

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The bright lights appear to frighten birds, particularly when squid boats operate near the islands, and attract predators such as barn owls and gulls that eat some of the birds. Also, rats and mice on the islands may pillage some chicks and eggs abandoned when parents flee the lights, said Gary Davis, senior scientist for Channel Islands National Park.

“We’re concerned with activities that result in a take of an endangered species, which is a violation of the Endangered Species Act,” said Carl Benz, wildlife biologist for the Fish & Wildlife Service. “We want to see actions put in place for the conservation and recovery of the species.”

To protect the birds, the five-member Fish and Game Commission will consider three strategies when it meets at 8:30 a.m. today at Long Beach City Hall.

One calls for restricting the power of the lights on a single boat to a maximum of 30,000 kilowatts, which would be a 50% reduction for many vessels. The second calls for installing cowling to deflect the lights onto the water instead of into the sky. Those restrictions would apply to squid boats operating anywhere on the California coast.

Tests conducted by the Fish and Game Department and squid fishermen Jan. 22 at Catalina Island showed those modifications reduced the amount of light reaching the island by about 90%. That approach is favored by the fishing industry and is being recommended by staff members at the Fish and Game Department.

“It’s going to be a little bit of a hardship for the smaller boats,” said Don Brockman, who runs two squid boats out of Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard. “It won’t be simple and it won’t be easy, but we think it can work.”

It is the third proposed remedy that has proven most controversial. It calls for prohibiting squid fishing for one mile around Anacapa, San Miguel and Santa Barbara islands between Feb. 1 and Aug. 31, and it represents a dramatic expansion of the current restriction that fishing boats keep about a quarter mile away from the islands.

That proposal has drawn heavy fire from fishermen, who have been hit hard by new federal regulations, which took effect Jan. 1, that cut commercial catches of rockfish by more than half on the West Coast.

“This is a big issue for us,” said John Borman, president of Sun Coast Calamari in Oxnard. “The fishing community is averse to area closures because we have a long history of never getting them back. If we lose that area, it means we lose revenue and that means we lose jobs.”

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Further, fishermen suspect the National Park Service is using bird protection as a cover to advance its long-term objective of turning 20% of the waters around the five northern islands into fishing-free zones. So-called no-take zones are gaining favor in California and around the world as the last, best tool for stopping the collapse of fisheries and rebuilding stocks.

“This is another reason to talk about no-take zones and where you might place them so you have the minimum impact economically and culturally. There’s a nexus there,” said Davis, the park service scientist.

Some fishermen, however, acknowledge that a limited squid-fishing closure at three islands would not be a heavy blow. About 75,000 tons of squid have been captured along the entire California coast since April, and less than 7% of that catch came from San Miguel, Santa Barbara and Anacapa islands, according to the Fish and Game Department.