August 11, 2022 — A federal judge has rejected the National Marine Fisheries Service’s “mitigation” for allowing continued “maximum” commercial harvests of the endangered Chinook salmon the imperiled Southern Resident killer whales need to survive — among the mitigations, that the agency will figure out better mitigations before the orcas go extinct.
U.S. District Judge Richard Jones accepted a magistrate judge’s recommendation for summary judgment in a lawsuit filed by Wild Fish Conservancy in 2020. The recommendation revealed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries agency violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by authorizing commercial salmon harvest at levels that are pushing protected wild Chinook salmon and Puget Sound orcas to extinction.
The Washington-based nonprofit challenged the authorization of the Southeast Alaska Chinook troll fishery, which the agency approved based on vague plans to fund production of 20 million young salmon annually to increase prey for the orcas by 4 to 5%. But the agency had no plans for where to get the young fish, who would release them and where, the age of the fish at release, the juvenile-to-adult return ratio, how many fish would be needed for future broods and whether all of this would be enough to sustain the orca in the long term.