February 1, 2023 — Alaska’s Southeast salmon troll fishery is again in the crosshairs with the latest round of legal action threatening the loss of its key chinook fisheries.
In December, a western Washington district court released recommendations to suspend fishing under the Incidental Take Statement, a provision within the Pacific Salmon Treaty that allows Alaska trollers to take wild chinooks throughout the year.
The legal battle began in 2020 with a lawsuit filed by the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy that challenges the biological rationale in setting allocations of Pacific Salmon Treaty chinooks that Southeast trollers catch.
The premise of the case is that when the National Marine Fisheries Service rendered its biological opinion in the formation of the treaty, it did not consider a portion of the commingling stocks as forage fish for the population of 73 killer whales in Puget Sound. The WFC suit rides on the contention that the agency acted out of compliance with the Endangered Species Act.
In a 2021 ruling the same court agreed that NMFS was out of compliance. Since then, the agency has been working on language that it hopes will satisfy mandates within the ESA. But the question remains whether the Alaska troll fishery will be able to operate or not.