SEATTLE — California farmers want to take Puget Sound’s killer whales off the endangered-species list, arguing they are not a separate population and that protecting the fish they eat is hurting business.
The listing of the animals as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2005 caused cutbacks in irrigation to protect fish, and that’s made it harder to get loans from banks, pay help and expand their operations, argues a petition filed by Empresa de Bosque and Coburn Ranch. The two farms raise a variety of crops, from cherries to almonds, melons and tomatoes, using irrigation water from several California water districts in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The listing of Puget Sound’s orcas has affected farmers in California because the southern resident orcas travel the outer West Coast in winter, and are known to feed on salmon as far south as the Sacramento River.
The petition to delist was filed on the farmers’ behalf by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit based in Sacramento that has built a $25 million business fighting endangered-species listings, environmental restrictions, Title IX funding for high-school sports, affirmative action in public-sector contracting and more.
The foundation, with its motto "Rescuing liberty from coast to coast," operates regional offices in Bellevue, Wash., Hawaii and Florida. It is funded with individual contributions and awards of attorneys’ fees.
NOAA Fisheries has accepted the petition and will finish by August a status review of the southern resident population of killer whales to determine if listing is still warranted.
Donna Darm, assistant administrator for protected resources at NOAA, said new science, including findings published in peer-reviewed journals since the orca was listed, warrants a new look at the listing. The decision to consider the petition does not indicate what the outcome of the review will be, she noted.
If the animals were taken off the endangered-species list, designation of critical habitat for them would disappear, but other protections under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, including a requirement the animals not be harassed or harmed, and that whale-watch vessels keep 200 yards away, would remain.
NOAA Fisheries’ listing of orcas as endangered came a year after it listed the animals as threatened in 2004. It had decided in 2002 not to list them, after initially determining the southern resident killer whales of Puget Sound, in J, K and L pods, were not a distinct population segment.
That finding was set aside by a U.S. District Court judge in 2003, who ruled there was enough uncertainty in the science to give the matter more study. The agency convened a science task force that eventually found the southern resident killer-whale population to be a distinct population, resulting in the 2005 listing.
Since then, the agency has designated 2,560 square miles of Puget Sound critical habitat for killer whales; required whale-watch vessels to keep a longer distance from the animals; and produced a recovery plan. But the southern resident population remains at about only 86 animals.
Fred Felleman of Seattle, who in 2001 advocated for the original petition for listing, said the petition now to delist the orcas is a distraction from the necessary work of rebuilding orca populations.
To him, the distinct behavior of the southern residents sets them clearly apart from other orcas. They eat only fish, while other orcas eat seals and other mammals. They have distinct family groups, dialects, greeting ceremonies and migratory patterns.
"If there was ever a poster child for this type of subspecies, it’s the killer whales," he said. "It’s not just their genetics, it’s culture. These clearly are the tribes of the sea, and if you extirpate that population not only do you lose the genetic code, you lose a unique brain trust."
(Contact Lynda V. Mapes at lmapesseattletimes.com. Seattle Times news researcher Gene Balk contributed to this report.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com)
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