Oceana Sues NOAA Fisheries Over Bottom Trawling

International ocean advocacy group Oceana has filed a lawsuit against NOAA Fisheries, claiming that it has failed to meet federal requirements for protecting the ocean floor environment.

Oceana, represented by environmental litigation nonprofit Earthjustice, filed its lawsuit Aug. 16 in the U.S. District Court in Anchorage, challenging the fishery service’s approval of amendments to five fishery management plans for fisheries in the North Pacific.

The amendments revise plan descriptions of essential fish habitat, which include all types of aquatic habitat where fish breed, spawn, feed or grow to maturity.

The lawsuit asks the court to remand the amendments and the environmental assessment supporting those amendments for completion of new amendments that comply with existing federal fisheries laws.

Oceana contends that in approving the amendments, the defendants ignored important obligations under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Instead of using the amendments to advance protections of corals, sponges and seafloor habitat from damaging impact of trawling, NOAA Fisheries ignored and underrepresented fishing effects and declined to consider alternatives that would have protected benthic species and habitat with minimal displacement of fishing effort, the lawsuit contends.

Oceana Pacific campaign director and senior scientist Ben Enticknap said that deep-sea coral and sponge ecosystems, some of which are hundreds of years old, can be destroyed by just one pass of a bottom trawl.

“Protecting fragile seafloor habitats that are important for breeding, feeding, and spawning is essential for healthy ocean ecosystems and for fisheries like halibut and crab,” Enticknap said.

“As has been demonstrated off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands by using the best available science and being proactive, fishery managers can protect ocean habitats while still allowing for trawling,” he continued. “Unfortunately, for the past decade, that’s not been happening.”

In June 2023, Oceana submitted a Gulf of Alaska seafloor habitat protection proposal to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) to protect 90% of the Gulf from bottom trawl impacts, while displacing no more than 5% of the existing trawl fleet.

The council also heard testimony related to known coral gardens in areas open to trawling and in support of habitat protection and mitigation of trawl impacts. Yet subsequently the council and fisheries service took no conservation actions at their end of their multi-year Essential Fish Habitat process, Oceana said in an Aug. 19 statement.

The Gulf of Alaska is the last place in Alaska largely open to bottom trawling, where the footprint of bottom trawling is not limited, Oceana said. Federal fishery managers have protected the central and western Aleutian Islands, where only 5% of the region is now open to bottom trawling, as well as similar action to prevent expansion of trawling into the Northern Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean.

Ninety percent of ocean waters off the West Coast of the United States are closed to bottom trawling, while areas important to bottom trawl fisheries do remain open, Oceana said.