November 15, 2022 — The following is an excerpt from Alabama Public Radio:
Tribes in the Pacific Northwest say a law that protects seals and sea lions undermines their fishing rights. They want a new strategy that would better manage the marine mammals eating their salmon. From member station KNKX, Bellamy Pailthorp reports.
BELLAMY PAILTHORP, BYLINE: On the Nisqually River Delta near Olympia, Wash., you can see the effects of the Marine Mammal Protection Act playing out.
WILLIE FRANK: Hopefully we didn’t scare them, but there’s about 200 sitting right there.
PAILTHORP: Willie Frank III maneuvers his boat to the mouth of the river, where hundreds of harbor seals have been sunning themselves on the banks.
FRANK: Yep. See? There they go. They’re scooting.
PAILTHORP: Frank is chairman of the Nisqually Indian tribe. He’s the son of the late Billy Frank Jr., who led the fishing protests in the 1960s and ’70s that secured tribal treaty fishing rights here. But he says those rights are threatened by growing numbers of hungry seals. When the tide comes in, the seals follow the fish upriver for miles.
FRANK: I mean, these are areas where they never used to come. They wouldn’t come up to the I-5 bridge, but now they go well past that.
PAILTHORP: And he says when fishermen are out on the water, the seals head straight for their nets.