How to Send Your Email:
Send your email here.
Input your information
Personalize your subject/message (research shows it is more effective when it is personalized)
Hit Send Letter
Information:
Getting caught in fishing gear is the leading threat to whales, dolphins and other marine mammals. Every year around the world, more than 650,000 of these animals die caught in nets or snagged on fishing hooks — a crisis euphemistically called “bycatch.” Entanglement could lead to extinction for many severely imperiled species, including vaquita porpoises, Indian Ocean humpback dolphins, New Zealand sea lions, Māui dolphins, and North Atlantic right whales.
To confront this massive threat, the Marine Mammal Protection Act requires the U.S. fishing industry to meet a set of standards for minimizing entanglement.
This law also applies to foreign fisheries, which must meet the same standards to escape a U.S. ban on their seafood. Yet these critical standards — with so much potential to help marine mammals around the globe — have gone virtually ignored for decades.
NOAA Fisheries has been dragging its feet on enforcing the law's requirements. In 2016 the agency set a deadline of 2021 for foreign fisheries to meet U.S. standards or face a ban. That deadline was extended to 2022 and then to 2023. Recently the agency again extended the deadline, through December 2025. Precious marine mammals and ocean ecosystems can't wait that long.
Tell NOAA Fisheries it's past time to ban seafood imports that don't meet U.S. standards for marine mammal protection.