"ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska's Cook Inlet beluga whales were correctly listed as endangered, a federal judge ruled Monday, rejecting a state lawsuit that claimed the listing will hurt economic development."
"Judge Royce C. Lambeth of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the National Marine Fisheries Service properly followed requirements of the Endangered Species Act and used the best science available in making its determination.
Cook Inlet beluga whales did not bounce back after a decade, despite a ban on subsistence hunting blamed for depleting their numbers, he said.
'When the best available science predicts that a recently enacted ban on subsistence hunting will reverse the abrupt depletion of a species, a decade without any noticeable recovery in the species population should raise a concern that the true cause of its decline has not been fully addressed,' Lambeth wrote."
Dan Joling reports for the Associated Press November 21, 2011.
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