Alaska Loses Challenge to Beluga Whale Threat

[The Straight Story]

Alaska Loses Challenge to Beluga Whale Threat


WASHINGTON (CN) - A government agency used the best available science before adding the beluga whale population of Alaska's Cook Inlet to the endangered species list, a federal judge ruled.

Alaska filed suit in June 2010 to overturn the listing, claiming that the beluga population had stabilized after a precipitous decline caused by several years of unregulated hunting by Native Americans.

Chief U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth disagreed Monday, saying that the National Marine Fisheries Service did not expect a stable population after authorities brought subsistence hunting under control in 1998. This led it, rationally, to consider other issues facing the species:

"The absence of an expected change is sometimes indistinguishable from the presence of an observed one," Lamberth wrote. "So when the best available science predicts that a recently enacted ban on subsistence hunting will reverse the abrupt depletion of a species, a decade without any noticeable recovery in the species' population should raise a concern that the true cause of its decline has not been fully addressed."

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/11/23/41705.htm