The death in a fishing net of a 5-month-old Hawaiian monk seal, nicknamed Penelope by volunteers who oversaw her puphood, has fired up the issue of regulation of lay gillnets.

"If there's anything to be said about the death of this baby female, it's that it is a wake-up call," said ocean advocate Donna Kahakui, who has raised attention for marine issues by lone long-distance ocean canoe paddles.

Just how lay gillnets should be used — and whether they should be permitted at all — is an issue that has pitted fishers against each other, regulators against environmentalists, and Hawaiians against Hawaiians.

But there is no support for the netting behavior that appears to have led to Penelope's death 75 yards off Masai Pier at Waimanalo — a net that was set and then apparently left unattended for at least a full day with Penelope trapped in it.

The state Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Aquatic Resources is massaging a proposed set of new gillnet regulations after a series of July public hearings, and expects to produce updated rules by the end of the year.

"Penelope brought the issue right to the forefront," said Peter Young, DLNR chairman. She was an endangered species native to the Hawaiian Islands, a female, and therefore crucial to the recovery of the population, and she appeared healthy.

A week before the seal's death, she had been seen extracting netted fish out of another net in the same area.

"This was a bad sign. This girl was learning about free food," said D.B. Dunlap, a monk-seal volunteer who works with protected species across O'ahu.

Seals generally do not prefer the reef fishes caught in nets, but they can be conditioned to take such fish as an easy food source, said David Schofield, the marine mammal response network coordinator for NOAA Fisheries.

Conservation officers removed that net, which no owner appeared to be watching. Some of the fish in the net appeared to be rotting, suggesting the net hadn't been checked for a long time.

On the morning of Oct. 15, a diver saw a seal caught in a net off Masai Pier. He reported it to the state Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement that evening, and representatives went out the next morning. They found Penelope wrapped in the net, dead, along with a small whitetip shark and a number of papio and other reef fish. Once again, the net appeared to be unattended — perhaps having washed away from where it originally was set by a fisher, who did not track it down.

The net that trapped Penelope violated both current and proposed gillnet regulations in one key respect: Netters are required to regularly check their nets — at least every two hours under present law and every 30 minutes according to the proposed regulations that were taken to public hearing this year. For many people, even that is not good enough, since a turtle or seal could drown within 30 minutes.

Some netters have argued that using the lay gillnet is a Hawaiian cultural tradition. But Cha Smith, director of the Hawaiian-environmental alliance Kahea, said that early Hawaiians, using nets they wove themselves out of cordage they made by hand, would hardly have treated their nets the way people treat cheap monofilament netting. They would have been carefully set, and constantly monitored to collect specific fish and to prevent damage to the gear.

"We think that the lay nets as they're using them now are really inappropriate. The material is completely different, and it's nonselective fishing. You leave the net out there to catch whatever's going by. It is not a pono fishing technique," Smith said.

Early Hawaiian fishing involved "active fishing, not passive fishing," Young said his own research has indicated.

Under its proposed regulations, the Department of Land and Natural Resources would limit the time nets can be left in the water and unattended, would prohibit night fishing, would require identification tags on each net and would ban lay gillnet fishing entirely around Maui and parts of O'ahu.

That's probably excessive regulation, said Paul Dalzell, senior scientist for the Western Regional Fishery Management Council. While the council has taken no position on the Hawaiian gillnet regulations, it has participated in management of gillnet use in fisheries elsewhere in the Pacific.

"A complete ban is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut," he said. In Fiji, there was a ban on commercial netting, while allowing people to continue to use nets to fish for their families, Dalzell said.

Other alternatives include limiting the days of the week when net fishing is permitted, or using an entirely different regulatory system — community-based management — in which local areas control the use of their own nearshore waters.

"Any gear can be used badly," Dalzell said.

Others say that areas where netting is banned will recover their fish resources more quickly and clearly demonstrate the threats posed by the nets.

"We believe that the proposed regulations are a good first step toward a statewide ban" by proving that net fishing is destructive to marine populations, said Kim Hum, director of marine programs for The Nature Conservancy of Hawai'i.

Fishing advocate Chuck Johnston, publisher of the Hawai'i Fishing News, said that while he opposes many kinds of regulations on fishing, he has come to oppose most forms of netting.

"I think that there should be a complete ban on lay gillnets in the state of Hawai'i. This is bad — the reefs can't handle it, and a few people are taking more than their fair share of the resources. We're talking about a lot more than a seal here. We're talking about getting reef fish back to where they were," Johnston said.

Kahakui said that while she supports strict regulation, she recognizes that there are groups who use nets responsibly.

"You can take a look at Hawaiian families who are taking care of the resource. In Kahana, they never left a net alone. But I support a ban in Kailua — where I live — because you see the nets washing away and just killing fish," she said, as well as other species, such as seals and turtles.

Monk-seal volunteer John Johnson, a photographer, said the death of Penelope in a net left him with a sense of loss.

"The one thing that's really striking about it was that we watched her interacting with her mother 24 hours a day for 50 days. The amount of energy and sacrifice that the mother goes through is unbelievable. She doesn't eat during that period. And to have it all wiped away is just a tragedy," Johnson said.

Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com.