The corals barely came up. For most of Monday's hearing before a Ninth Circuit panel, the argument over bottom trawling off Alaska turned on a much drier question: has anyone actually been hurt?
Oceana, represented by Earthjustice, wants the appeals court to revive a challenge it lost in the federal district court in Anchorage. At issue are five amendments the National Marine Fisheries Service approved to management plans covering federally managed groundfish, crab and salmon fisheries in Alaskan waters. Oceana filed its notice of appeal on 8 December 2025.
The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act obliges the agency to identify "essential fish habitat" and to minimise the adverse effects fishing has on it. Oceana's case is that the service used two inadequate screens and then concluded there was nothing to address.
"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 representing Oceana.
The 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 position is that the gear does the damage regardless of catch levels — nets scraped along the bottom wreck habitat, and that flows through to fish some of its members depend on for subsistence. Bumatay was unconvinced the harm traced back to these particular amendments.
"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 argued the threshold at this stage is lower than the judge was treating it. "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, asked whether the statute mandates any particular evaluation method. Judge Carlos Bea, another Bush appointee, rounded out the panel.
Justice Department attorney Amy Collier told the court Oceana had picked the wrong defendant action.
"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.
On the science, she defended a practice two decades old. "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."
A trio of industry trade groups intervened on the government's side. James Feldman, arguing for them, said Congress left the judgment call with the agency.
"The service has the technical and the scientific expertise to determine what is practicable when it comes to minimizing adverse effects," Feldman said.
None of that resembles the language Oceana used when it sued 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. "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."
Earthjustice senior attorney Charisse Arce framed it as a statutory failure. "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 said much the same when the appeal was lodged. "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 in December.
The underlying figures are not in dispute. A bottom trawl net can be hundreds of feet wide and a mile long, towed up to 15 miles along the seafloor in one pass. Oceana's habitat proposal, put back in front of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council last December, would close more than 90 percent of the Gulf of Alaska to bottom trawling while shifting an estimated 7 percent or less of recent trawl effort. Sizeable protections already exist in the Aleutians, the northern Bering Sea and the Arctic — but more than 90 percent of the central and western Gulf is still open.
The Fisheries Service noted it is already conducting its regular five-year update of essential fish habitat information, an open process Oceana is participating in.
The panel did not say when it would rule.