Ocean Waters off California and Oregon on Track for Protection
The Fisheries Service’s finding, published in the Federal Register, comes in response to a formal petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, Oceana, and Turtle Island Restoration Network seeking the designation as critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act an area of ocean spanning from Big Sur, California to central Oregon. The proposed protected area, comprising roughly 200,000 square miles, is a food-rich upwelling region favored by many marine species, including the leatherback.
The last members of an ancient lineage that has outlived the dinosaurs, leatherbacks are ocean giants that grow to the size of a small automobile, dive more than half a mile deep, and migrate across the entire Pacific Ocean basin from their nesting grounds in New Guinea and Indonesia to feed in the rich waters off California and Oregon . Leatherbacks swim more than 6,000 miles within a single year and have the largest geographic range of any living marine reptile, as well as one of the longest known migrations for any species in the world .
Leatherback sea turtles in the Pacific Ocean have declined by more than 90 percent over the past three decades, primarily as a result of drowning in industrial longline and gillnet fisheries aiming to catch swordfish, sharks, and tunas. Marine debris and loss of nesting beaches due to global-warming-induced sea-level rise also threaten the leatherback. If current trends continue, Pacific leatherbacks are predicted to go extinct within the next few decades.
“Leatherback sea turtles survived the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, but they are unlikely to survive our unsustainable appetite for swordfish,” said Brendan Cummings, staff attorney and oceans program director with the Center for Biological Diversity. “If leatherbacks are to survive the coming decades, we must turn the waters off California and Oregon into a true sanctuary for these imperiled creatures. Designating critical habitat is a vital step towards that end.”
