Wild Fish Conservancy Suit Aimed To Speed Up Petition To List Southeast Alaska King Salmon

A Washington-based conservation group continues its crusade against the Southeast Alaska troll fishery with a lawsuit to accelerate its petition to list Southeast Alaska’s king salmon as endangered/threatened.

Here’s more from Nathaniel Herz of the Northern Journal via the Alaska Beacon:

The Wild Fish Conservancy filed its lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., saying that the National Marine Fisheries Service had missed a 12-month deadline under the Endangered Species Act to decide on the conservancy’s proposal to list Gulf of Alaska king salmon.

The conservancy, in its 17-page complaint, said it formally asked the service to list the king salmon in a petition Jan. 11, 2024, which gave the agency until Jan. 11, 2025, to respond. The lawsuit asks a judge to order the service to “promptly issue” its decision on the petition by a specific date.

“With the crisis facing Alaskan chinook, we are out of time and options,” Emma Helverson, Wild Fish Conservancy’s executive director, said in a prepared statement, using another name for king salmon. She added: “The Endangered Species Act sets clear deadlines for a reason, to evaluate the risk of extinction and trigger action while recovery is still possible.”

The conservancy’s press release announcing the lawsuit points to other listing proposalsthat the fisheries service had failed to act on within 12 months and described “systemic dysfunction” at the agency.

From the Wild Fish Conservancy’s press release:

“It should not take a lawsuit to make the federal government uphold its legal responsibility, but with the crisis facing Alaskan Chinook, we are out of time and options,” said Emma Helverson, Executive Director of Wild Fish Conservancy. “The Endangered Species Act sets clear deadlines for a reason, to evaluate the risk of extinction and trigger action while recovery is still possible. By ignoring those deadlines, NOAA isn’t just breaking the law—it’s perpetuating the collapse of Alaskan Chinook and threatening the ecosystems and communities that depend on them.”

Despite their historical abundance, data from the state of Alaska demonstrates persistent declines in Chinook abundance, size, age, diversity, and spatial structure. Many are surprised to learn some Alaskan Chinook populations are in even worse condition than other Pacific Northwest populations already listed under the ESA. Threats include overfishing, bycatch in trawl fisheries, hatchery impacts, habitat degradation, and climate change. Alaska has already recognized many of these stocks as ‘species of concern’ over the last decade, due to their continued decline in the face of the state’s attempted regulatory actions.

“Alaska’s leadership insists it’s taking aggressive steps to recover Chinook and that those efforts are proving successful, but the state’s own data shows this couldn’t be further from the truth,” says Helverson. “We’ve heard directly from Alaskan fishers, Indigenous individuals, and the general public who depend on Gulf of Alaska Chinook who are frustrated by the state’s false narrative and inaction. These individuals expressed relief and optimism in the ESA process, not only for its comprehensive review, but also for the tangible actions and increased resources it can bring to begin rebuilding populations.”