Sent Via First Class Mail and E-mail March 8, 2016 Eileen Sobeck Assistant Administrator for Fisheries NOAA Fisheries 1315 East-West Highway Silver Spring, MD 20910
[email protected] Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske U.S. Customs and Border Protection 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington, DC 20229
[email protected] Daniel M. Ashe, Director U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 1849 C. Street, NW, Room 3331 Washington, DC 20240
[email protected] Re: Petition to Prevent the Import of Illegally Caught Tropical Fish into the United States and Require Testing and Certification Dear Ms. Sobeck, Mr. Kerlikowske, and Mr. Ashe: Each year, cyanide fishing – a fishing method used to collect tropical marine fish for the aquarium trade – likely kills tens of millions of tropical marine animals, including thousands of acres of corals around the globe.1 Although this deadly practice is almost universally banned in nations that are the source of the fish, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) estimates that 90 percent of the ten to thirty million tropical marine aquarium fish 1 Fred Pearce, Cyanide: an Easy but Deadly Way to Catch Fish, WORLD WILDLIFE FUND GLOBAL (Jan. 29, 2003), http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?5563/Cyanide-an-easy-but-deadly-way-to-catch-fish; Daniel Thornhill, Ecological Impacts and Practices of the Coral Reef Wildlife Trade, DEFENDERS OF WILDLIFE, at *7 (2012), available at http://www.defenders.org/sites/default/files/publications/ecological-impacts-and-practices-of-the-coral-reef-wildlife- trade.pdf [hereinafter Thornhill, Ecological Impacts and Practices of the Coral Reef Wildlife Trade].