Fisheries

Federal Chevron deference is dead. On June 28, 2024, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old legal tenet that when a federal statute is silent or ambiguous about a particular regulatory issue, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s reasonable interpretation of the law. The reversal came in a ruling on two fishery regulation cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. This decision means that federal courts will have the final say on what an ambiguous federal statute means. What’s not clear is whether most courts will still listen to expert federal agencies in determining which interpretations make the most sense. While courts and judges will vary, as a scholar in environmental law, I expect that the demise of Chevron deference will make it easier for federal judges to focus on the exact meaning of Congress’ individual words, rather than on Congress’ goals or the real-life wor...

Fishermen across the Gulf of Mexico are reporting that something is eating fish off their lines. What’s to blame? Many recreational anglers point a finger at sharks. This conflict has caught politicians’ attention. Congress has directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which regulates fishing in U.S. waters, to review shark and dolphin interactions with fisheries, and the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the SHARKED Act, which would create a task force to address the problem. I’ve studied this conflict, which is formally called depredation, for the past decade. While some shark populations in the Gulf of Mexico, such as bull sharks, are increasing, my colleagues and I have found evidence that human perceptions are also an important factor. A Gulf angler races to land a fish before sharks take it. Sharky waters The Gulf of Mexico is home to more than 70 species of sharks – and those...

Ocean-related tourism and recreation supports more than 320,000 jobs and US$13.5 billion in goods and services in Florida. But a swim in the ocean became much less attractive in the summer of 2023, when the water temperatures off Miami reached as high as 101 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius). The future of some jobs and businesses across the ocean economy have also become less secure as the ocean warms and damage from storms, sea-level rise and marine heat waves increases. Ocean temperatures have been heating up over the past century, and hitting record highs for much of the past year, driven primarily by the rise in greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Scientists estimate that more than 90% of the excess heat produced by human activities has been taken up by the ocean. That warming, hidden for years in data of interest only to oceanographers, is now having profound consequences for coastal economies around the world. Understanding the role of the ocean in th...

My colleagues and I mapped activity in the northeast Pacific of “dark” fishing vessels – boats that turn off their location devices or lose signal for technical reasons. In our new study, we found that highly mobile marine predators, such as sea lions, sharks and leatherback sea turtles, are significantly more threatened than previously thought because of large numbers of dark fishing vessels operating where these species live. While we couldn’t directly watch the activities of each of these dark vessels, new technological advances, including satellite data and machine learning, make it possible to estimate where they go when they are not broadcasting their locations. Examining five years of data from fishing vessel location devices and the habitats of 14 large marine species, including seabirds, sharks, turtles, sea lions and tunas, we found that our estimates of risk to these animals increased by nearly 25% when we accounted for the presence of dark v...

It sounds like a crime show episode at sea: In late January 2024, federal regulators learned that a dead female North Atlantic right whale had been sighted near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The whale was towed to shore, where more than 20 U.S. and Canadian scientists converged to perform a necropsy, or animal autopsy. On Feb. 14, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the whale was #5120 in a catalog that tracks individual right whales. Further, the agency said, rope that had been deeply embedded in the whale’s tail had likely come from lobster fishing gear in Maine. Entanglement in fishing gear is a deadly threat to these critically endangered animals. Scientists estimate that before commercial whaling scaled up in the 18th and 19th centuries, there may have been as many as 10,000 North Atlantic right whales. Today, fewer than 360 individuals remain. Almost 90% of them have been entangled at least once. When whales become en...

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Jan. 17, 2024, in two cases that center on fisheries management, but could have broad impacts on federal regulatory power. The question at the core of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce is whether the Secretary of Commerce, acting through the National Marine Fisheries Service and following the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, can require commercial fishers to pay for onboard observers whom they are required to take on some fishing voyages. In both cases, the plaintiffs assert that the Commerce Department has exceeded its legal authority. That claim turns on how much deference the court should give the agency’s interpretation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. The plaintiffs are challenging a nearly 40-year-old doctrine of federal administrative law, known as Chevron deference for the 1984 case in which it was set forth. This tenet provides that when a federal statu...

If you have ever gotten a vaccine or received an intravenous drug and did not come down with a potentially life-threatening fever, you can thank a horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus). How can animals that are often called living fossils, because they have barely changed over millions of years, be so important in modern medicine? Horseshoe crab blood is used to produce a substance called limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, which scientists use to test for toxic substances called endotoxins in intravenous drugs. These toxins, produced by bacteria, are ubiquitous in the environment and can’t be removed simply through sterilization. They can cause a reaction historically referred to as “injection fever.” A strong concentration can lead to shock and even death. Identifying LAL as a highly sensitive detector of endotoxins was a 20th-century medical safety breakthrough. Now, however, critics are raising questions about environmental impacts and the process for review...