ANCHORAGE — A 325-page plan issued Wednesday for Alaska sea lions lists dozens of actions needed for the animals to recover.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) recovery plan is a good one, but also is notable for what it lacks, said Brendan Cummings, oceans program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

For example, the plan does not call for increased regulation to curtail the Bering Sea fishery, even though it identifies the fishery as a potentially large threat to sea lions in the competition for food, he said.

The plan also treats too lightly the fact that sea lions are disappearing from the islands off San Francisco and fails to plan effectively for the effects of climate change, he said.

"It is a status-quo plan, not a recovery plan," Cummings said. "Given the sea lions' habitat is already changing as dramatically as any place on Earth, you can't talk about the future, which a recovery plan does, without squarely addressing what that will look like 30 years from now."

The plan looks at the eastern and western populations of Steller's sea lions in Alaska. It will cost more than $430 million for the western stock to fully recover, the plan says. The recovery cost for the eastern stock is about $1 million.

The plan reports no substantial threats to the eastern stock stretching from Southeast Alaska to California. Those are increasing at approximately 3 percent a year.

The problems are with the western population, extending from the eastern Gulf of Alaska to the western Aleutian Islands and beyond. Those sea lions are listed as endangered.

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