Tell the National Marine Fisheries Service to Protect Marine Mammals Now!
Dear John,
The risk of getting caught in fishing gear as "bycatch" is the leading threat to whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals. Every year, more than 650,000 marine mammals worldwide die or suffer serious injury when they are enveloped in nets or pierced by fishhooks.
For decades, US fishers have been required to comply with standards under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to minimize marine mammal entanglement. The MMPA requires foreign fisheries selling seafood on the US market to meet these same standards, yet this critical part of the law, with its vast potential to help marine mammals, has gone virtually ignored.
In 2016, the National Marine Fisheries Service finally set a deadline of 2021 for foreign fisheries to meet US standards or face a ban. That deadline was extended to 2022, then to 2023. Recently, the agency again extended the deadline, to December 2025. Every time the agency pushes compliance into the future, more marine mammals die needlessly.