A petition to list many Alaska king salmon stocks as endangered has cleared its first hurdle., it’s mainly a bureaucratic step for the petition, from the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy, and kicks off a scientific review likely to take at least a year.
But the National Marine Fisheries Service said in an announcement Thursday that listing the chinook stocks under the Endangered Species Act might be necessary to save the species. And the restrictions that would come along with such a listing could affect everyone from fishermen to road builders. Northern Journal reporter Nat Herz is here to talk about the petition, the Fisheries Service announcement and the implications.: This is the, one and the same, conservation group. The litigation that they filed a few years ago to try to protect Washington State resident orca whales almost led to the closure of this really economically important king salmon fishery across Southeast Alaska.
And what the Fisheries Service said was this petition actually had, you know, a bunch of omissions, a bunch of errors, some other problems. But at the bottom line, , “We do accept that the numbers of spawning king salmon have really declined pretty sharply in the past 20 years or so. We are seeing smaller king salmon returning to rivers and, you know, based on the facts as presented by this organization, a reasonable person would be concerned about the risk of extinction.
The flip side of that is for King Salmon. They’re seeing these declines kind of across the board, and you talk to even people who typically, like, hate the Endangered Species Act, they’re not denying that something needs to be done here. And they’re not necessarily disputing the the scientific conclusions, the data. One of the challenges is there isn’t one specific thing, and particularly not one specific thing that’s easily fixable, that seems like it’s causing this.