Set net fishing around the Otago Peninsula will be closed for good from 16 September, locking in a protection zone that was first thrown up as an emergency measure less than a year ago to stop yellow-eyed penguins drowning in commercial nets.
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones announced the decision on Tuesday, confirming that the temporary closure he imposed in September 2025 will become a permanent part of the fishing rules. Alongside it he is introducing a new mechanism called a Fishing Related Mortality Limit, which sets a hard annual ceiling on how many birds can be killed by fishing before the government tightens the restrictions further.
For the northern population of hoiho, the yellow-eyed penguin found along the lower South Island coast and around Rakiura Stewart Island, that ceiling has been set at four birds a year.
“This is not a target, it is a bottom line,” Jones said in the announcement. “It will further incentivise fishers to do everything possible to prevent hoiho bycatch.”
The limit is deliberately an escalating trigger rather than a quota. If nets keep killing birds and the count climbs towards four, officials can move quickly to close more water or restrict more gear without waiting for another round of consultation. Jones said further restrictions on fishing in the area would be put in place to make sure the limit is not exceeded.
The story of how the closure got here is unusually messy for a fisheries rule. Jones reached for his emergency powers in September 2025 and shut set netting in a high-risk patch of water off the peninsula for three months. In December he extended that ban by a further nine months while his officials reviewed the scientific evidence and ran a public consultation. In the middle of it the Environmental Law Initiative took him to the High Court, arguing the emergency closure did not go far enough, and the court found the ban itself was lawful. Rather than let the whole thing lapse this spring, Jones has now made it permanent.
The numbers behind the decision are small enough to sound trivial until you set them against the size of the population. RNZ reported that four hoiho were killed in nets in the 2024/25 fishing year, five the year before that, and four the year before that. Commercial set netting was assessed as the third largest cause of hoiho deaths in recent years.
Against that, WWF-New Zealand says only 115 nests are left across mainland New Zealand and Rakiura. Losing four or five adult breeders from a group that size is not a rounding error. A risk assessment carried out last year concluded that deaths from all causes need to be cut by half if the northern population is to stop shrinking, and Jones says the new fishing protections achieve that halving for the bycatch component.
Conservation groups have wanted this closure nailed down for years. “Hoiho are one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most treasured species, yet they are hanging on by a thread,” WWF-New Zealand’s Caitlin Owers said in a statement welcoming the decision. She said more than 5,000 New Zealanders had contacted ministers about the birds during the process.
“We cannot allow a future where the only place people ever see this priceless taonga is on the back of our five-dollar note,” Owers said, using the word for a treasure. She also warned the announcement does not end the problem. “Today’s announcement is a huge step forward, but hoiho are still facing a perfect storm of threats.”
Not everyone thinks four is the right number. Megan Cornforth-Camden, a senior legal adviser at the Environmental Law Initiative, questioned whether New Zealanders would accept four birds being killed each year as a result of a commercial activity, given how few are left.
The fishing industry made the opposite argument. Seafood New Zealand chief executive Lisa Futscheck welcomed having a settled rule after two years of temporary measures, but said the uncertainty leading up to it had undermined the benefit. The organisation’s inshore general manager Tiff Bock said scientific modelling had indicated six would be sustainable, higher than the limit the minister landed on.
What both sides agree on is that nets are not what is killing most of these penguins. Jones was explicit that disease, predation and starvation remain the bigger threats to hoiho, and monitoring on the ground has pointed the same way for years. Chick survival on the mainland has been poor, with last season producing one of the lowest fledging rates ever recorded. Set nets are simply the one cause a fisheries minister can regulate directly with a stroke of a pen.
That distinction matters for how much weight this decision should carry. It removes one identified cause of adult deaths in the population’s most important stretch of coast, and it does so permanently rather than for another nine months. It does nothing about the disease and predation on land, or about the food supply at sea.
The urgency is not in dispute. Research from the University of Otago published earlier this year found hoiho are actually three genetically distinct groups rather than one species, and warned the mainland line could vanish within a decade. If that happens, the birds on the Otago Peninsula would not simply be replaced by penguins from the subantarctic islands. A distinct lineage would be gone.
The permanent measures come into force on 16 September, almost exactly a year after the first emergency closure went up. Work on the rest of the threats sits with the Hoiho Governance Group, which brings together the Department of Conservation, the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust, Ngāi Tahu and Fisheries New Zealand under a joint recovery strategy for the species.
Have you seen yellow-eyed penguins on the Otago coast, and do you think the government has struck the right balance between the birds and the fishers? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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