Officials from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced that a final plan for recovering struggling bull trout will be released on Wednesday, Sept. 30, with the objective of lifting protections based on the Endangered Species Act.
The wildlife protection agency said the Bull Trout Recovery Plan will outline various conservation efforts aimed at increasing fish populations in California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
The plan will also include how the federal government will reduce threats to bull trout, particularly the presence of invasive fish species and barriers such as temporary dams that impede the trout from swimming upstream in order to spawn.
Steve Duke, FWS planning coordinator for bull trout recovery, said that the final plan can also be used by other agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service (FWS), U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Bonneville Power Administration, as guide for launching conservation programs.
He said that they are optimistic about the roadmap that they have created, which will help them save the threatened fish in recovery areas.
The bull trout has been under pressure in recent years and it was believed to have vanished from around half of the fish's historic range when it was included in the government's list of endangered and threatened species between 1998 and 1999.
The FWS's roadmap for the recovery of bull trout comes after the agency entered a legal settlement in 2014 with the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and other environmental organizations, which had alleged the federal agency of violating the Endangered Species Act by failing to draft a conservation plan to save the threatened bull trout.
Alliance for the Wild Rockies chief Mike Garrity criticized the final plan for ignoring bull trout population and its habitats. He called agency's move as an "extinction plan" and not a strategy for fish recovery.
Arlene Montgomery of the conservation group Friends of the Wild Swan said that the FWS's direction for saving the fish is very disappointing.
Biologists from the federal government said that the threats to the remaining bull trout population have been compounded by changes in the climate, causing temperatures of streams to rise. Droughts have also caused water flows to significantly decrease.
Photo: USFWS Mountain-Prairie | Flickr
