Wednesday December 27, 2023
Daily Kos —
On December 22, San Francisco Baykeeper filed a lawsuit against the US Fish and Wildlife Service for violating the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in its failure to issue a final rule on the petition to list the SF Bay-Delta population of Longfin Smelt (Spirinchus thaleichthys) as an endangered species.
The agency’s proposal to list longfin smelt, a cousin of the endangered Delta smelt, is the result of a series of petitions to and lawsuits against the agency, going back to 1992, according to the Baykeeper. The most recent monitoring data for longfin smelt in San Francisco Bay reveals that populations have crashed more than 99 percent, compared to when monitoring first started in 1967.
“The agency proposed listing the SF Bay-Delta population of longfin smelt as an endangered species in 2022, but failed to meet a deadline established by Congress in the law to make a final listing determination and to designate what counts as critical habitat for the imperiled fish,” according to a statement from the San Francisco Baykeeper.”