— from KOMO News —

Federal officials say they may restrict salmon fishing off the West Coast to help the Pacific Northwest’s critically endangered killer whales, but two environmental groups are suing anyway to ensure it happens.

The Center for Biological Diversity, which filed a lawsuit nearly two decades ago to force the U.S. government to list the orcas as endangered, and the Wild Fish Conservancy asked the U.S. District Court in Seattle on Wednesday to order officials to reconsider a 2009 finding that commercial and recreational fisheries did not jeopardize the orcas’ survival.

The National Marine Fisheries Service issued a letter early last month indicating that it intends to do so. Julie Teel Simmonds, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, said the point of the lawsuit is to ensure they finish the job with urgency, given the plight of the whales, and to take short-term steps in the meantime to help provide more of the orcas’ favored prey, Chinook salmon.

“We have got to figure out how to get them more salmon,” she said. “Since 2009 it’s become much more crystallized just how critical prey availability is to their reproductive success and survival.”

The Endangered Species Act requires the government to certify that any actions it approves won’t jeopardize the survival of a listed species. In the 2009 review, experts found that it wasn’t clear how a lack of prey affected orcas, but that the fisheries were not likely to contribute to their extinction.

Since then, however, the population of whales that spend their summers in the waters between Washington state and Canada — known as the Southern Resident killer whales — has fallen from 87 to 75. A calf born in December is the first to have lived past birth since 2015. And scientists have learned much more about how crucial it is for orcas to have enough of the large, fatty Chinook: As they starve, the whales start burning their blubber. Because toxins from water pollution are stored in the blubber, that can harm the whales’ reproductive ability, scientists believe.

READ FULL ARTICLE: komonews.com/news/local/2-groups-sue-trump-administration-over-orca-starvation-deaths

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