Suit Would Curb Navy Sonar for Marine Life

Suit Would Curb Navy Sonar for Marine Life

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - The U.S. Navy's plan to increase sonar exercises in the next five years will harm marine mammals and violates the Endangered Species Act, environmental groups say.

Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council joined the Center for Biological Diversity and four other groups in a federal complaint against National Marine Fisheries Service, which approved the Navy's plan. The suit also names the service's acting assistant administrator, Samuel Rauch, and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, who is the administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

For decades, the National Marine Fisheries Service has let the Navy conduct annual training exercises in an area of the Pacific Ocean that stretches from California's Mendocino Coast to Washington's Puget Sound. But the Navy's new permit requests have sought to increase the scope of these activities in a way that environmentalists claim would harm sea life.

In November 2010, regulators gave the Nave a five-year permit for these exercises, which will allegedly "harass marine mammals hundreds of thousands of times, disrupting their migration, breathing, nursing, feeding, and sheltering, and cause temporary hearing loss in species that depend on sound for their reproduction and survival."

http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/01/27/43417.htm