King Salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea keeps going up
11-9-07
Tim Bodony (KIYU)

An increasing amount of king salmon are being harvested as bycatch by Bering Sea pollock trawlers.  But the pollock fishing industry insists that it is doing everything it can to avoid the salmon, and no one has a solid explanation for why the bycatch levels are rising.  

King salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea was around 40 thousand in 2001 and 2002, and this year that number is close to 119 thousand. 

Chum salmon bycatch more than tripled between 2003 and 2005, before falling back to around 100 thousand incidentally-caught chums this year.   

According to genetic studies, about 56 percent of the king salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea come from western Alaska stocks.  And about 22 percent of the total king salmon bycatch are Yukon River salmon.   

Salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea is increasingly a hot topic among fishermen in western and Interior Alaska.  Subsistence and commercial interests are united in their belief that the pollock fishery has to reduce its salmon bycatch in order to protect the salmon returns to western Alaska rivers. 

Becca Robbins-Gisclair is a policy coordinator with the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association.  YRDFA is pushing for changes to the management of the pollock fishery aimed at protecting western Alaska salmon stocks, but Robbins concedes that trying to explain the spike in bycatch numbers is tough. 

Robbins-Gisclair: That's the million dollar question right now, and to be honest, we don't really know what's going on.  There have been some changes in regulations, in that these Savings Area Closures that we had in the past don't exist anymore.  The pollock fishery has been operating under this new "hot-spot" system, and certainly it would appear that that must be contributing. Another possibility is that salmon populations have shifted.

The prior system for limiting bycatch would close off certain areas of the Bering Sea to pollock fishing when salmon bycatch reached a certain level.   

When bycatch started its upward trend a few years ago under this system, the industry moved to a voluntary rolling hot spot system, in which the pollock boats shared information on a daily basis in an effort to find the best spots to fish pollock, while catching the least amount of salmon.   

Robbins-Gisclair says that system didn’t work either. 

Robbins-Gisclair: The new system is definitely innovative in fisheries management. They are trying to look at the areas of high bycatch, and on a continual basis, close those areas.  But the way the system is set up, they are limited in how much of an area they close.  And so, from our side, it is hard not to say that that must be part of this picture, since when we had the Salmon Savings Areas in place for so long, we did not see numbers quite this high.

The pollock industry is also having a hard time pinning down a single cause for the rise in salmon bycatch.   

Stephanie Madsen is the Executive Director of the At-Sea Processors Association, which represents the pollock fleet.  Madsen also worked closely on the development of bycatch restrictions, as the former Chairwoman of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council. 

She understands why people would come blame the new Voluntary Rolling Hot Spot system for the increase in salmon bycatch, but argues that there are lots of factors to consider when trying to solve this problem.   

For one, maybe an increase in bycatch means that there are more salmon in the Bering Sea to be caught. 

Madsen: The industry believes that there is a high likelihood that the biomass of salmon in the Bering Sea is higher.  We've not changed where we fish, too much, other than being closed out of areas when there is interaction with salmon.  We generally have the same amount of pollock, and we fish at generally the same time of year. So that activity hasn't changed. What has changed is our interaction with salmon - that we just don't seem to be able to avoid them.

Trying to avoid salmon, Madsen says, has in the past brought the pollock fleet into even higher densities of salmon than before. 

Madsen: Several years ago, the trigger happened, the fishery was moved out of that area, and the salmon rate, the number of salmon per metric ton, increased when we moved the fleet outside of the closure areas. Some of those [bycatch] rates were higher outside the closure areas, than if we had allowed the fleet to continue to fish in the closed areas.

A potential silver bullet solution could be a special addition to the typical trawling net, which would allow salmon to escape but keep the pollock in the net.   

Robbins-Gisclair explains the technology:

Robbins-Gisclair: The pollock fleet has been working on a salmon excluder device, which is basically a gear modification that they place in their nets that takes advantage of the different behaviors of salmon and pollock, and basically gives salmon an escape portal.  They've been working on that for quite a few years, and at this point from the most recent reports I've heard, it's still not up to par to put to use in the whole fleet.

The fishing industry has paid for testing of the salmon excluder device at a huge tank in Nova Scotia, where researchers can watch how different species of fish respond to various types of nets. 

Pollock boats do not financially benefit from the increased bycatch of salmon, which is considered a prohibited species to the Pollock fishery.  The salmon are dead by the time they are pulled up in the nets, and then are either thrown overboard, or donated to food banks or other charities on-shore.   

The Bering Sea and Aleutian Island pollock fishery is one of the most lucrative in the world.   About 1-point-5 million metric tons of pollock were harvested in 2006, much of it going into mass-produced food items like fish sticks and imitation crab meat.   

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council regulates the pollock industry.  A working group of the Council is coming up with alternate methods of limiting bycatch, including a hard cap system which would shut down pollock fishing when salmon bycatch hit a specified level.   

The management council is scheduled to consider changes to bycatch regulations at its June 2008 meeting, with a final vote coming as soon as December of next year.