August 21, 2024 — Until about 20 years ago, little was known about the abundance of colorful cold-water corals that line sections of the seafloor around Alaska.
Now an environmental group has gone to court to try to compel better protections for those once-secret gardens.
The lawsuit, filed Monday by Oceana in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, accused federal fishery managers of neglecting to safeguard Gulf of Alaska corals, and the sponges that are often found with them, from damages wreaked by bottom trawling.
Bottom trawling is a practice that harvests fish with nets pulled across the seafloor.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service “ignored important obligations” to protect the Gulf of Alaska’s seafloor, under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, the lawsuit said.