Pacific Marine Monuments Face Fishing Pressures and Legal Battles

Thousands of miles from California, the Pacific marine monuments are centered on tiny islands and atolls.

One of them is Palmyra Atoll, about as far from a continent as you can get on the planet.

No one lives here permanently, but it’s home to a field research station run by The Nature Conservancy, a conservation nonprofit. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff also rotate in, since the atoll’s land is protected as a national wildlife refuge.

“Atolls are small when you look at them on the map, but they have an oversized impact on the ocean around them,” says Alex Wegmann, lead scientist of island resilience at The Nature Conservancy.

“They are very important epicenters of biodiversity and of abundance.”

Atolls are formed by ancient volcanic islands surrounded by coral reefs. As the volcano erodes and disappears below the water, the reef continues to grow upward.

Eventually a ring of low-lying islands forms, built from the skeletons of the reef that surrounds it.

World War II brought even more changes. As fighting in the Pacific escalated, the U.S. military remade many atolls, building bunkers, air bases and refueling stations. Ship channels were dredged through coral reefs. Some atolls were used for nuclear and biological weapons testing.

Seabirds use them as nesting sites to raise their young, returning to the open ocean to hunt for fish. Sooty terns spend years at sea, flying thousands of miles before coming back to land to breed.

The reefs surrounding many atolls are still largely untouched, with coral colonies the size of city buses.

At Palmyra Atoll, blacktip and grey reef sharks cruise the reefs’ edges. Scientists have found it has one of the highest densities of predators in the world, a rare example of a food chain that remains intact.

Seabirds rely on those tuna and other large predators to corral schools of small fish. As tuna feed, they drive the schools near the ocean’s surface, where birds can reach them.

This interconnected ecosystem, stretching from treetops to the deep sea, is one of the reasons the waters around Pacific atolls were granted federal protections.

Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument was established in 2006 in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Its boundaries were later expanded in 2016.

It is the largest fully protected conservation area in the United States.

Last year, President Trump opened parts of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to allow commercial fishing beyond 57 miles from shore.

After conservation groups sued, a judge ruled that the Trump administration must go through a full regulatory process to change the fishing rules. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now in the process of considering those changes.

In June, Trump proclaimed that commercial fishing be allowed in the deep waters of three other Pacific monuments, including Papahānaumokuākea.

“We’re reclaiming our maritime heritage, empowering American fishermen and putting American consumers first,” Trump said in June. “America’s fishermen have never had a better ally in the White House than Donald Trump.”

At the Honolulu tuna auction, as much as 100,000 pounds of fish are unloaded every day. Most of it is bigeye and yellowfin tuna, which is sold fresh as high-grade fish used in poke and sushi.

Hawaii’s fishing industry says it’s facing increasing competition on the high seas from foreign vessels also searching for tuna, as well as rising diesel fuel costs. Opening Pacific marine monument waters could give the fleet more opportunities, since foreign ships wouldn’t be permitted to fish there.

“Our view is that we can have both: We can have very high levels of protection and allow sustainable fishing in the same place,” says Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawaii Longline Association. “It’s really about the opportunity to fish away from foreign competition.”

“It’s not just about the ecology and the plants and animals, but the living systems of human communities that evolved with those resources are just as important,” says Kekuewa Kikiloi, associate professor at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

“With this new administration, we’re probably under the biggest threat we’ve ever faced in terms of trying to hold the line of defense for this place,” he says.

After the protections for Papahānaumokuākea were expanded, a study in 2022 found that the catch rate of yellowfin tuna went up 54%. Bigeye tuna catch rates went up 12%.

A 2024 study by another group of researchers found no evidence that catching yellowfin tuna was easier. It did find that bigeye tuna was 13% easier to catch.

Federal officials at NOAA did not respond to questions about opening the marine monuments or the potential impacts of fishing.

Conservation groups say that with climate change, the Pacific marine monuments deserve the highest level of protection. The healthier an ecosystem is, the better chance it has to withstand the impacts of warming waters.

“These are the jewels in the crown not only for the U.S., but they’re globally significant,” says Alan Friedlander, affiliate researcher at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology. “It’s really incumbent upon us to make sure that they’re here for not only us, but for future generations.”

Conservation and Hawaiian cultural groups say they plan to file a lawsuit to challenge the opening of the three Pacific marine monuments, including Papahānaumokuākea.

For the fourth monument, Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, federal officials at NOAA are expected to release a decision on commercial fishing this year.