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Salmon Trolling Seasons Halted to Help Orca Recovery by Mateusz Perkowski Capital Press, May 8, 2023

Orca recovery is also cited as a reason to remove dams,
which environmental advocates argue will improve fish survival.

To increase food available to orcas, a federal judge has overturned the U.S. government's authorization of winter and summer chinook salmon troll fishing along Alaska's southern coast.

The judge has also refused to suspend a hatchery fish production program while its environmental consequences are reevaluated, since additional prey will help the endangered killer whales.

The ruling is meant to remedy Endangered Species Act violations the federal government committed in 2019 by approving portions of the state's fisheries conservation plan.

Elements of the plan were determined to be unlawful last year in the Wild Fish Conservancy nonprofit's lawsuit against state and federal regulators.

U.S. District Judge Richard Jones in Seattle has now vacated the National Marine Fisheries Service's decision to allow the "incidental take" of orcas that results from winter and summer commercial salmon harvest.

Chinook salmon are themselves listed as threatened and their scarcity has contributed to the misfortunes of the Southern Resident orca population, which has dwindled to 73 individuals along the West Coast.

Halting the commercial fishing seasons may bring "a small hypothetical benefit" to this endangered population segment -- also known as Southern Resident killer whales, or SRKW -- but will cause "guaranteed economic disaster" for fishermen, according to the Alaska Trollers Association.

The association, which joined the lawsuit as a defendant, is challenging the ruling before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Though farmers aren't directly involved in the litigation, they have been ensnared in the broader controversy over human impacts on orcas.

Salmon depend on the health of inland fish-bearing streams, implicating agricultural practices that affect waterways, including irrigation diversions, pesticides and riparian buffers.

Orca recovery is also cited as a reason to remove dams, which environmental advocates argue will improve fish survival. Dam removal is opposed in rural communities due to the loss of hydropower and irrigation water storage.

The Alaska fisheries plan was faulted in federal court for relying on uncertain recovery efforts to allow salmon harvest to continue, as well as for insufficiently analyzing the counterproductive effects of hatchery fish production.

While considering potential remedies, the court heard widely varying estimates of the financial disruption caused by stopping summer and winter salmon trolling. The lost income was pegged at $9.5 million by the environmental plaintiff and at $29 million by the defendants.

A magistrate judge who reviewed the case said she "does not take such economic consequences lightly," but they're outweighed by the potential damage to orcas from commercial fishing under the plan.

However, the magistrate judge decided against blocking the plan's hatchery fish program, which is meant to increase prey availability for the cetaceans.

Despite the genetic harm from interbreeding between wild and hatchery fish, orcas will nonetheless benefit from the additional food, said U.S. Magistrate Judge Michelle Peterson.

"Wild salmon populations are clearly important to the long-term maintenance of the prey populations available to the SRKW, but hatchery production helps to offset the overall historical decline in the abundance of wild salmon, which are sorely needed by the SRKW as prey," she said.

U.S. District Judge Richard Jones has now adopted the magistrate judge's recommendations, halting the summer and winter trolling seasons without stopping the hatchery fish production program. However, the government must still reconsider the program's environmental effects under the ruling.