Environmentalist moves to sue New Jersey and EPA to protect ‘the dinosaur of the Delaware’

The Delaware Riverkeeper Network organized a funeral for the Delaware River's Atlantic sturgeon in 2022 to protest government officials' inaction on protecting them. Maya van Rossum, who has served as Riverkeeper since 1994, is pictured holding the microphone. (Photo courtesy of Delaware Riverkeeper Network)

The torpedo-shaped Atlantic sturgeon is such an old fish it’s sometimes called a living fossil.

But the endangered Jurassic-era fish is disappearing fast, and New Jersey is poised to play a pivotal role in its extinction, according to environmentalist Maya van Rossum.

Van Rossum, who has worked to protect the Delaware River and its watershed since 1994 as the Delaware Riverkeeper, is so frustrated by officials’ inaction that she notified U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental officials in New Jersey, New York, and Delaware recently that she will sue them if they don’t act to protect the “dinosaur of the Delaware.”

“This is an ancient species that has been around since the time of the dinosaurs. It has survived every cataclysmic event on Earth, but now it may be driven to extinction because of the actions of people,” van Rossum said. “We are morally responsible to take actions to correct the behaviors that are resulting in the driving of this species to extinction.”

The Delaware River’s population of Atlantic sturgeon is the most imperiled in the world, with less than 250 spawning adults left — down from more than 200,000 in the late 1800s, van Rossum said.

They’re dying in droves for multiple reasons, including vessel strikes, waters warmed by climate change, and development and dredging projects that ruin their habitat, van Rossum said.

But in her letters alerting federal and state officials of her intent to sue, she focuses on two other problems where she accused officials of failing to act — water pollution and commercial fisheries’ bycatch.

On the pollution issue, the EPA missed a deadline to finalize federal water quality standards on the Delaware River that would require polluters to clean up discharges, leaving Atlantic sturgeon struggling to survive in currents with lethal levels of dissolved oxygen, van Rossum said.

That means the EPA is in violation of the federal Clean Water Act until it finalizes the standards, she said.

Atlantic sturgeon also die after getting caught in the nets of commercial fisheries trawling for other fish like flounder and bass, van Rossum said.

The federal Endangered Species Act prohibits the “take” of an endangered species but makes an exception for fisheries’ bycatch, as long as states obtain an “incidental take” permit that requires them to develop a conservation plan to offset the harms of such fishing.

However, New Jersey, New York, and Delaware do not have those permits, and the EPA has failed to hold them accountable, van Rossum said.

New Jersey reported to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in 2019 that it was developing its incidental take permit, so its five-year delay in securing the permit suggests a “flagrant … willful and deliberate” violation of the Endangered Species Act, van Rossum said.

In her letters to the EPA and the states, van Rossum offered officials 60 days to act on the violations she reported, or she will sue.

Virginia Nurk, a spokeswoman for the EPA’s mid-Atlantic region, said the EPA received van Rossum’s lawsuit notice but does not comment on pending litigation. Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, also declined to comment.

The lawsuit notices come after environmental groups have spent decades working to save the sturgeon, van Rossum noted.

“Every single time a governmental agency, whether at the state level or the federal level, has had the opportunity to help protect the sturgeon, they have chosen not to do so. They have chosen to turn a blind eye, to allow the pollution and the development and the fish strikes and the air emissions contributing to the climate crisis and the devastation to their habitat and the ecosystem,” van Rossum said. “So we have been left with no alternative but to litigate.”

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