Anchorage Daily News

JUNEAU -- Federal regulators have issued a new plan aimed at getting the Steller sea lion off the endangered species list.

One of the plan's major directives is continuing restrictions on commercial fishing in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.

These restrictions, first imposed several years ago, are designed to prevent fishing nets from scooping up fish the sea lions eat near their rookeries and resting rocks.

Waters around these places are closed up to 20 miles out to sea. And the annual fishing seasons for pollock, cod and mackerel are broken up into pieces spread through the calendar to prevent concentrated catches.

The 325-page Steller sea lion recovery plan updates an original plan from 1992.

"Ultimately, the goal is to be able to remove Steller sea lions from the endangered species list," said Doug Mecum, acting Alaska chief for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Assuming some modest but steady population growth rates, the sea lion could be delisted after 2030, the new recovery plan says.

The population of Stellers -- large males can grow up to 11 feet long and weigh 2,400 pounds -- plunged by 70 percent between the 1970s and 1990 over the animal's western range from Prince William Sound through the Aleutians.

The endangered western population today is about 45,000 animals, federal researchers say.

For years, commercial fishing groups, environmentalists and regulators have struggled over how to protect the animals and still conduct some of the nation's largest commercial fisheries worth an estimated $1 billion annually.

The conflict reached an ugly climax in 2000 when a federal judge temporarily booted fishing fleets out of vast fishing areas. Congress, led by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has poured tens of millions of dollars into Steller sea lion research.

The recovery plan will help shape another key document expected later this year -- a "biological opinion" of whether fisheries, as currently restricted, jeopardize sea lions or their habitat.

Some see the new recovery plan as inadequate.

Phil Kline, a Greenpeace activist and former commercial fisherman, said the Bering Sea industry needs to take fewer pollock and leave more for sea lions and other animals to eat.

"It is a status quo plan, not a recovery plan," added Brendan Cummings, oceans program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Brent Paine of the trade group United Catcher Boats said commercial fishermen aren't ready to concede that fishing is responsible for the sea lion problem. While boats generally have been able to catch their full seasonal limits of pollock and other fish, their operating expenses are much higher because they can't drop their nets where and when the fishing is often best, he said.

"There was some serious real estate closed" to protect the sea lion, Paine said.

The recovery plan ranks potential threats to Steller recovery. Changing environmental conditions and killer whale attacks on sea lions are ranked "potentially high" threats, as is commercial fishing. Disease, subsistence harvests and shooting -- fishermen once could legally kill scavenging sea lions -- are listed as "low" threats.

Find Wesley Loy online at adn.com/contact/wloy or call him in Juneau at 1-907-586-1531. The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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