DoC faces questions over ‘hidden’ Hector’s catch

Friday, 18 September 2020

Why was a Hector’s dolphin death publicly notified five months after it happened? David Williams reports

The Department of Conservation is being accused of hiding an endangered dolphin’s death for political purposes.

On March 4, Fisheries staff within the Ministry for Primary Industries notified DoC of a Hector’s dolphin caught in a set net just south of Banks Peninsula. The catch, which happened the day before, was self-reported by a Lyttelton-based commercial vessel, which was fishing for sharks about seven nautical miles offshore from the Rakaia River. No observers were on board.

Eugenie Sage, the Minister of Conservation, was notified via a weekly status report on March 9. However, the dolphin’s death wasn’t recorded in the department’s incident database until mid-August – and only after it was revealed in an Official Information Act (OIA) response.

The Department of Conservation is being accused of hiding an endangered dolphin’s death for political purposes.

* Government crack down on fishing methods to protect New Zealand Hector's and Māui dolphins

In between, on June 24, Sage and Minister of Fisheries Stuart Nash announced greater protection for Hector’s and Māui dolphins, by closing new areas to set-netting and trawling, and extending existing closed areas.

Awkwardly, and as outlined in MPI’s initial email to DoC on March 4, the dolphin death south of Banks Peninsula happened in an area proposed for a set-net closure, through updating what’s called the threat management plan, or TMP.

Later that day, in an email released to Newsroom under the OIA, DoC’s manager of marine species, Ian Angus, said it was a “sensitive time given decisions on the TMP are pending”. He adds: “We are planning to update ministers [on the dolphin death] this week once we have more details.”

Lian Butcher, DOC’s aquatic director, tells Newsroom the March 3 catch was simply overlooked. “This was not a deliberate omission and the oversight has since been corrected.”

But Christine Rose, the chairperson of Māui and Hector’s Dolphin Defenders, isn’t convinced. “While the ink on the threat management plan was drying they were hiding information about bycatch occurring in those areas.”

The incidents should be properly recorded, she says, “in the best interests of transparency as well as proper conservation management”.

Dolphin and marine conservation expert Liz Slooten, a professor at University of Otago’s department of zoology, says by not publicising dolphin deaths there is less pressure on ministers to make more precautionary decisions.

“There are statements and actions that indicate that this is not desirable to have all these dead dolphins in the media,” she says. “We’ve seen, over and over, the information either trickled out very, very slowly, or not provided at all.”

Dolphin advocates point to a history of delayed disclosure of the endangered animals’ deaths, and a track record by officials, they claim, of not releasing information unless they have to.

Marine biologist Rochelle Constantine, an associate professor at University of Auckland’s biological sciences, says it’s excellent the fisher reported it. “This information is really helpful in developing effective management approaches to issues around bycatch.”

Industry group Seafood New Zealand also applauds the commercial fisher’s actions. Chief executive Jeremy Helson says the delay in publication is a matter for DoC.

“The impacts of the dolphin threat management plan on the fishing community on the Banks Peninsula were severe. Given the severity, we find Slooten’s theory this was ‘hidden’ because of the pending ministerial decision bizarre.”

The offices of Ministers Nash and Sage didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Delayed disclosures

Dolphin advocates point to a history of delayed disclosure of the endangered animals’ deaths, and a track record by officials, they claim, of not releasing information unless they have to.

Slooten says the 2012 death of a Māui dolphin near Cape Egmont, well south of the Māui protected area at the time. There were delays in the death being reported to the Fisheries Ministry, and it was only reported to the Conservation Minister’s office almost a month later.

Some deaths aren’t reported, or are inaccurately reported.

As part of an MPI investigation called Operation Achilles, it was discovered, by examining electronic monitoring videos, that a commercial fisherman off the east coast of the South Island reported the capture of one Hector’s dolphin when in fact he’d caught two. (Four of the five vessels in the project openly discarded substantial quantities of quota fish and didn’t report catches as required.)

DoC’s Hector’s and Māui dolphin incident database was updated about a week after the Fisheries NZ OIA response was received.

In March 2018, Minister Nash publicly announced five Hector’s dolphins were killed in a single set net. The news came a month after it had happened and 11 days after Nash himself had been told – and two days after a public march organised by Māui and Hector’s Dolphin Defenders.

The group’s chair, Rose, says: “We feel that, not just in that instance, but in the way that both sightings and entanglements are reported and categorised, it’s manipulated for political purposes to undermine the seriousness of the risks to the dolphins and to manage the impacts of public concern requiring a response to those incidents.”

(The Government’s 2019 consultation on changes to the threat management plan received more than 15,000 responses, and a 76,000-signature petition. Briefings to ministers estimated the population of nationally critical Māui dolphins at 63 individuals above one year old, while the Hector’s dolphin, ranked as nationally vulnerable, is thought to have about 15,700 individuals.)

This year’s March 3 dolphin death was uncovered by an OIA request by Christchurch’s Genevieve Robinson, a member of Māui and Hector’s Dolphin Defenders. The request, lodged on June 17 and answered on August 12, asked for bycatch data off the Canterbury and Otago coasts – a time that, during the lockdown, there were fewer observers on fishing boats because the programme was put on hold because of Covid-19.

DoC’s Hector’s and Māui dolphin incident database was updated about a week after the Fisheries NZ OIA response was received.

Robinson says a quarterly update is fine “for paperwork”, but government agencies should release information more quickly when there are incidents involving endangered species. “The more the public knows the more we can act, and it is public pressure that makes changes. What the Government’s doing isn’t effective.”

DoC’s director, Butcher, says it tries to ensure all relevant information is disclosed in a timely manner and is accurate, which “can be a challenging task”. He says Angus’s comment was a simple reference to the threat management plan review being underway – “and so all information needed to be collated and verified to ensure accuracy”.

“It is unfortunate that in collating the information on the incident, and supporting the review of the threat management plan, the incident was overlooked in the quarterly database update.”

As part of the changes announced in June, a change to regulations gives the fisheries minister powers to act immediately to impose further restrictions if a single dolphin is caught in the Māui dolphin habitat within the North Island’s west coast.

Rose, the Māui and Hector’s Dolphin Defenders chair, says: “We really struggle to have confidence in that commitment given that these incidents have been withheld from the public in the past.”

(On this point, Nash’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Transparency about fishing catches feeds into the controversial issue of cameras on boats, which the Government made little progress on – widely thought to be because it was blocked by New Zealand First.

Earlier this month, Nash announced it would consult on a proposal to spend up to $60 million to put 345 cameras on boats by the end of 2024. That was panned by Greenpeace as weak, when the commercial fishing fleet has 1500 registered vessels.

Newshub revealed this week a three-year, Fisheries NZ camera research project showed seabird captures were about twice as high on vessels with cameras on board compared to those without cameras installed.

Concern over the lack of protection for Māui dolphins has prompted conservation advocacy group Sea Shepherd to take a US lawsuit seeking to ban New Zealand seafood imports. The Government has joined the case.

Slooten, of the University of Otago, says more transparency on bycatch is needed. Without far more observers or cameras on boats, or a combination of those two, she says there can be little confidence in official figures. Only when better systems are in place can a reasonable proportion of dolphin deaths be detected, she says.

“The fishing industry have a social licence to catch fish, but they don’t have a social licence to kill dolphins.”