NOAA Fisheries said Thursday it wouldn’t list any Alaskan chinook salmon populations under the Endangered Species Act, denying a petition from an environmental group.
In a Federal Register notice, the agency said it had reviewed three population subgroups of Gulf of Alaska chinook salmon and found they are “not currently in danger of extinction” or likely to become so in the future.
Agency scientists grouped the salmon, which are sometime called Alaska king salmon, into three different populations: Southeast Gulf of Alaska, Central Gulf of Alaska and Northwest Gulf of Alaska.
Though some population numbers have declined, NOAA Fisheries said each has “large overall population sizes spread across multiple stocks, viable levels of productivity, broad spatial distributions, and high diversity.”
