March 18, 2025 — A U.S. district court judge has rejected a lawsuit seeking a new environmental impact study of the Bering Sea commercial pollock fishery, allowing NOAA Fisheries to continue relying on studies from 2004 and 2007 to regulate the fishery.
“We are deeply disappointed by this decision, which allows the National Marine Fisheries Service to continue relying on outdated studies while our salmon populations collapse,” TCC Chief and Chairman Brian Ridley said in a statement.
March 13 2025 — Federal actions are causing uncertainty in the scheduled openings of Alaska’s Pacific fisheries, raising concerns among fishermen and owner/operators about potential disruptions to the fishing season.
Recent personnel changes within the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) have cast doubt on the scientific assessments crucial for managing fish stocks in the region. According to the Alaska Beacon, three NMFS employees in Alaska were recently dismissed, creating unease about the continuity of scientific research that informs fisheries management. These individuals collected and analyzed stock assessment data, a key factor in determining sustainable catch limits. Their sudden removal has led to concerns that vital scientific work may be delayed or compromised just as fisheries prepare to open.
The potential gaps in research have alarmed commercial fishermen, who rely on accurate stock assessments to guide their operations. Without up-to-date data, fishery managers face challenges setting quotas, which could result in either overly restrictive or overly lenient catch limits, both of which carry economic and ecological risks.
March 8, 2025 — A federal judge in Hawaii ruled Thursday that the National Marine Fisheries Service had wrongly denied climate change protections to 20 threatened coral species in the Indo-Pacific and Caribbean, even though the service had previously identified climate change as the main threat to these corals’ survival.
U.S. District Judge Micah Smith granted partial summary judgement to the Center for Biological Diversity, which petitioned for the corals’ protection in 2020 and sued the service in 2023 for regulations to address climate change, a ban on international trade, and protections against local threats like development and poor water quality.
“I’m delighted by this court ruling because it underlines climate change’s overwhelming threat to imperiled corals,” said Emily Jeffers, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ve lost half of the world’s coral reefs in the past 40 years, and if we don’t act quickly the rest could disappear forever by the end of this century.”
Smith determined that the service failed to explain properly why it wouldn’t protect corals from climate change.
The agency had claimed such regulations would have “limited effectiveness,” but Smith found this explanation inadequate, especially since climate change poses the greatest threat to these species. The court labeled this decision “arbitrary and capricious” and ordered the agency to reconsider.
“In reaching this conclusion, it is worth noting what NMFS did not say. NMFS did not conclude that it lacked the legal authority to adopt Section 4(d) regulations to address climate change. Nor did it say that it was unaware of what Section 4(d) regulations it might adopt to accomplish those ends, or that the center’s petition suffered from a lack of clarity,” Smith wrote.
The judge similarly overturned the service’s decision not to issue regulations protecting Caribbean coral species from local threats, finding that the agency also provided no proper justification for this choice.
March 4, 2025 — After several hundred employees were fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last week as part of DOGE’s workforce cuts, reporting has focused on how those cuts might threaten critical weather modeling and systems that help predict and warn the public about severe weather events such as hurricanes and tsunamis.
In response to a question asking for more details on the staff cuts, a NOAA spokesperson told Civil Eats that “per long-standing practice, we are not discussing internal personnel and management matters.” But reports suggest staff cuts have happened across all six offices within NOAA, including the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).
February 19, 2025 — Conservation groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday morning against the National Marine Fisheries Service for missing its deadline to determine if spring-run Chinook salmon in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California warranted protection under the Endangered Species Act. The organizations behind the lawsuit seek a court order to compel the Fisheries Service to issue a finding within a suitable time frame.
“These iconic fish are at risk of disappearing from our coastal rivers forever if the Service doesn’t act quickly,” Jeremiah Scanlan, a legal fellow at the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “Spring-run Chinook salmon badly need protections, but instead, the agency has taken the lazy river approach and drifted past its own deadlines.”
The Center for Biological Diversity, Native Fish Society, Umpqua Watersheds, and Pacific Rivers claim the Fisheries Service violated federal law when it failed to issue a timely finding within 12 months of their petition asking for three Chinook salmon populations to be listed as “threatened” or “endangered” — the Oregon Coast Chinook salmon, the Southern Oregon and Northern California Coastal Chinook salmon, and the Washington Coast spring-run Chinook salmon.
“The agency’s failure to meet the deadlines delays crucial, lifesaving protections for these species, increasing their risk of extinction,” the groups said in their lawsuit.
Chinook salmon, also known as “king salmon,” are the largest of all Pacific salmon species. Although the fish were once abundant in the river basins of the Pacific Northwest, their populations have declined sharply in recent years and are now only a fraction of their historical size.
January 17, 2025 — The State of New Hampshire has been notified by the National Marine Fisheries Service of a vacancy for New Hampshire’s obligatory seat on the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC). NEFMC is one of eight regional councils in the United States established by federal regulation in 1976. It is charged with conserving and managing fishery resources from 3 to 200 miles off the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
To assist in filling this vacancy, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department’s Marine Fisheries Division will host a candidates’ interview night on Monday, February 10, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. at the Urban Forestry Center in Portsmouth, NH. Potential candidates should be prepared to present their qualifications at this session. Interested candidates should contact Cheri Patterson, Chief of Marine Fisheries for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, at (603) 868-1095 in advance of the meeting.
November 25, 2024 — In a recent decision, the United States District Court in Alaska ruled against a Seattle-based fishing trade group, Groundfish Forum, which challenged new federal rules affecting new limits on halibut bycatch in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands.
The National Marine Fisheries Service developed the regulations after a 2021 recommendation by the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council to limit bycatch from the groundfish fleet. Proponents say the limits protect halibut populations from the trawl group, which accounts for more than half of the halibut bycatch in the area.
Groundfish Forum, which represents a group of large trawl catcher-processors, filed a suit to stop those limits. They said the rules change the way halibut bycatch is managed, tying the cap to the abundance of halibut in the area: when halibut populations are high, the cap stays steady. But if populations dip, the cap goes down, by as much as 35%.
The fishing group said this puts an unfair burden on their sector, while other fisheries in the region aren’t facing the same constraints. They also said the proposed cap is unrealistic because it’s too strict to implement, which they claim violates conservation laws.
November 5, 2024 — A D.C. Circuit panel grappled Monday with the fallout from the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn a longstanding legal doctrine which allowed federal judges to defer to a government agency’s interpretation of a challenged statue.
The high court ruled 6-3 in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that the doctrine, known as Chevron deference, should be overturned and that federal judges themselves should instead “exercise their independent judgment” when an agency oversteps its authority.
That case was originally argued before the D.C. Circuit in 2021, the appellate circuit that deals the most with challenges against federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and, in this case, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
In its decision to overturn Chevron, the high court remanded the case to the three-judge panel to reassess claims by a coalition of fishing companies that the government was wrong to require they pay the wages of independent “at-sea monitors.”
October 16, 2024 — Federal officials have agreed to take another look at how Washington state regulates a deadly poison — cyanide.
The lethal substance is often used to make metals, plastics, dyes, and pesticides and to extract gold and silver from mineral ores.
The concern is that legal levels of cyanide winding up in Washington waters may be harming wildlife, including orcas and other endangered species.
In 2010, National Marine Fisheries Service biologists concluded that concentrations of cyanide allowed under existing regulations were enough to kill salmon and sturgeon in large numbers and would reduce the prey base for endangered killer whales.
October 15, 2024 — We have a simple message: it’s time for the Biden-Harris Administration to update the National Standard 4, 8, and 9 guidelines. The next step is to publish the Proposed Rule developed by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to update the guidelines. The Administration should move this forward as soon as possible.
Across the country, fishermen are grappling with shifting stocks, collapsing markets, and vanishing opportunity. It’s not all doom and gloom, but there’s plenty of both to be found walking the docks in 2024. What we see on the water and in our communities makes clear that the ways federal fishery management allocates access to resources, treats communities, and stops bycatch in one fishery from impacting another must be modernized.
To build climate resilience and ensure that coastal communities maintain access to their local fisheries, action is needed now. As a recent study from the Government Accountability Office (the leading federal watchdog) points out, there’s a serious need to build in measurable goals and objectives for bycatch accountability, with enforceable timelines for their achievement. And as we have emphasized to NMFS, updating the National Standard guidelines represents a key opportunity for substantial progress. Congress has explicitly authorized NMFS to make these updates, and the agency must take the opportunity.