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Federal court rulings finally give wild orcas a place at the table for salmon harvests [1]

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Date: 2022-09-05

Dr. Deborah Giles monitors the health of the Southern Resident orcas for Wild Orca and the University of Washington.

“This is unbelievable news, yet so long in coming,” said Deborah Giles, the science and research director for Wild Orca, an organization that had supported the NOAA lawsuit. “Most fish caught in the Southeast Alaska Chinook fishery are from home rivers in the Southern Resident killer whales’ critical habitat—areas designated by NOAA Fisheries as essential to their survival. The government’s own research has shown that Chinook from Washington state rivers are vital prey in winter, and yet they have permitted these fish to be caught when they’re feeding in Alaska, depriving the whales of the vital nutrition needed to sustain healthy pregnancies, and grow this population.”

Back in 2019, NOAA’s own internal assessment acknowledged that allowing harvest of Chinook salmon in southeastern Alaskan waters was harming the orcas: “Under the existing management and recovery regimes over the last decade, salmon availability has not been sufficient to support SRKW population growth.” Allowing fishermen to overharvest those salmon, it said, impacted the orcas “by reducing prey availability, causing them to forage for longer periods, travel to alternate locations, or abandon foraging efforts.”

NOAA officials, however, essentially ignored their own biological assessment and allowed the harvest to proceed as it always had, that they “would be able to develop and implement mitigation plans to counter the [fisheries’ impact] prior to the Southern Resident killer whales’ extinction,” saying it would secure funds for a conservation program to “benefit Puget Sound Chinook salmon stocks.” Those plans, of course, never materialized.

The Wild Fish Conservancy filed suit in 2020, and when federal Judge Michelle Peterson heard the case in September 2021, she found that NOAA Fisheries’ policy was “arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with the law.”

Peterson found that their plans notably did not include “any specific deadlines for implementing the proposed mitigation, nor does it include specific requirements by which to confirm that the mitigation has been implemented in the manner and on a schedule needed to avoid the extinction of the Southern Resident killer whales.” Her report ordered NOAA to reduce the harvest

Earlier this month, Peterson’s ruling was approved and adopted in an order issued by District Judge Richard Jones, who noted that Peterson will submit an additional report with appropriate remedies for the violations committed by the defendants, which include NOAA, the fisheries service, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Both the state of Alaska and the Alaska Trollers Association are defendant-intervenors in the case.

“Fisheries should be compensated for loss of revenue, as the Canadian Government has done in their efforts to save Pacific salmon,” Giles explained. “Yet there is no equivalent reparation for killer whales, for whom Chinook is essential. It is clear from our health monitoring that hatchery fish have failed to make up for the loss of wild Chinook in the ecosystem. We must save our wild salmon if we are to save the Southern Resident killer whales.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/5/2118606/-Federal-court-rulings-finally-give-wild-orcas-a-place-at-the-table-for-salmon-harvests

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