A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel spent Monday morning pressing an ocean conservation group on a question that had little to do with corals: whether it had been injured at all.
Oceana, represented by Earthjustice, is asking the appeals court to revive its challenge to five amendments the National Marine Fisheries Service approved to management plans covering federally managed groundfish, crab and salmon fisheries off Alaska. A federal district court in Anchorage dismissed the case; Oceana filed notice of appeal on 8 December 2025.
The legal fight is narrow. Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the Fisheries Service must identify "essential fish habitat" and minimise the adverse effects fishing has on it. Oceana argues the agency leaned on two flawed screens to conclude there was nothing to fix.
"All the court needs to decide is a straightforward legal question: Can the Fisheries Service meet its obligation to minimize all adverse effects on all designated essential fish habitat by using only two tests to identify those adverse effects?" said Katherine Glover, the Earthjustice attorney arguing for Oceana.
Those two are the core essential fish habitat test and the minimum stock size threshold test.
"These are the only two required tests in the Fisheries Services process, and they're both unlawful, alone or in combination, because neither test cures the flaws of the other," Glover said.
"What's the injury here if you're saying it's the right amount of fishing, how are you being injured?" Bumatay asked.
Oceana's answer is that the harm is the fishing method itself — nets dragged across the seafloor damage the habitat, which in turn affects the fish that some of its members rely on for subsistence. Bumatay was not persuaded that the chain reached the amendments actually being challenged.
"Even if they were to adopt what you would consider analysis that is compliant with the law, they might not find any adverse effect, and so there'd be no change in the amount of fishing," he said.
Glover pushed back on how high the bar sits at this stage. "I don't think the court needs to decide whether there is long-term permanent harm to essential fish habitat in order to find that there's standing here," she said. "It simply needs to find that there is a plausible chain of causation."
U.S. Circuit Judge Consuela Callahan, a George W. Bush appointee, raised a separate problem: whether the statute prescribes any particular method at all. Judge Carlos Bea, also a Bush appointee, completed the panel.
For the government, Justice Department attorney Amy Collier argued Oceana had aimed at the wrong target.
"Oceana's claimed injury is from this 'continued trawling' in this area, but the actual agency action that they're challenging are these minor amendments to the fishery management plan that don't authorize any continued trawling and instead are non-regulatory efforts to update the essential fish habitat information," Collier said.
She also defended the population-level approach as long-settled practice. "The service is coming at this looking at the species at a population level, and it's done this since 2005; it's looked at whether the species is above or below this threshold in doing so," Collier said. "And I don't think there's anything unreasonable about that."
Three industry trade groups intervened as defendants. Their attorney, James Feldman, argued Congress had handed the agency room to judge what "practicable" means.
"The service has the technical and the scientific expertise to determine what is practicable when it comes to minimizing adverse effects," Feldman said.
That framing is a long way from how Oceana described the stakes when it filed in August 2024.
"Deep-sea coral and sponge ecosystems, some of which are hundreds of years old, can be destroyed by just one pass of a bottom trawl. Protecting fragile seafloor habitats that are important for breeding, feeding, and spawning is essential for healthy ocean ecosystems and for fisheries like halibut and crab," said Ben Enticknap, Oceana's Pacific campaign director and senior scientist, at the time. "As has been demonstrated off Alaska's Aleutian Islands, by using the best available science and being proactive, fishery managers can protect ocean habitats while still allowing for trawling. Unfortunately, for the past decade, that's not been happening."
Charisse Arce, an Earthjustice senior attorney, put the failure in statutory terms. "NMFS ignored important obligations under both the Magnuson-Stevens Act and NEPA when it failed to adopt meaningful measures to five fishery management plans for the North Pacific Ocean to help protect corals, sponges, and important seafloor habitat from the destructive effects of trawling," she said.
Enticknap returned to the theme when Oceana appealed last December. "Some corals in the Gulf of Alaska are hundreds of years old, and it's terrifying to think that they are vulnerable to the destruction of a trawl net when there are reasonable and responsible ways to protect them while still allowing for productive fisheries," he told National Fisherman.
The numbers behind the dispute are not really contested. Bottom trawl nets can run hundreds of feet wide and a mile long, and be towed as far as 15 miles across the seafloor in a single pass. Oceana's habitat protection proposal, resubmitted to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council last December, would close more than 90 percent of the Gulf of Alaska to bottom trawling while displacing an estimated 7 percent or less of recent trawl effort. Managers have already fenced off large areas in the Aleutians, the northern Bering Sea and the Arctic; more than 90 percent of the central and western Gulf remains open.
The Fisheries Service told the panel it is already running its next scheduled five-year update to the essential fish habitat information, and that Oceana is taking part in that process.
The panel gave no indication of when it will rule.