A hearing on seafood bycatch didn’t satisfy a bipartisan group of Alaska legislators at a meeting of the House Fisheries Committee on Nov. 15.
The bycatch issue came up again this summer when all Yukon River salmon fisheries were canceled due to so few returning Chinook and chums. Along with ocean and climate impacts, villagers questioned the takes by huge trawlers that catch and process fish at sea.
A presentation of the committee hearing by Glenn Merrill, regional administrator at NOAA Fisheries/Alaska, showed that in the 2019 Bering Sea pollock fishery 20,000 Chinook salmon were taken as bycatch and more than 500,000 chums, with only 1% originating from the Yukon River.
The hearing shifted from salmon to the building anger among Alaskans over the amounts of halibut, crab and other seafood taken as bycatch in federally managed waters (3 to 200 miles out), where nearly 65% of Alaska’s fish volumes are harvested.
Most bycatch is taken by a wrong gear or the fish is caught out of season or it’s too small and federal law dictates that it must be thrown overboard, Merrill explained.
He showed that bycatch totals in 2020 were 3.3 million pounds by pot gear, more than 38.5 million pounds by hook and line, and more than 92 million pounds by trawlers, who fish at varying depths down to the bottom.
Federal rules for fisheries, “require balancing minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable while achieving the optimum yield from each fishery,” Merrill told the Fisheries Committee and 140 watchers and listeners.
Bering Sea sablefish (black cod) in 2020 ended the year at 7.9 million pounds (519%) over the trawl bycatch limit. Managers responded by increasing the 2021 trawl limit by 65%.
In response to complaints, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council said in June 2021: “When constraints such as high bycatch rates emerge, vessel operators do not have the option to cease fishing completely because cost accrual on such large platforms would be unsustainable.”
Sablefish takes are currently 2 million pounds (165%) over the 2021 bycatch limit, and yet fishing continues.
A fundamental management failure is now on display in the Bering Sea crab fisheries, where trawler bycatch for 2021/22 is higher than what the actual commercial crabbers can take.
For Bristol Bay red king crab, closed to commercial harvest for the first time in 25 years, trawlers are allowed 80,000 crab as bycatch totaling more than 500,000 pounds.
Many Alaskans are calling for a shift away from protecting “optimum yields” in industrial trawl fisheries toward optimizing the health of the state’s fishery resources and communities.
That will be put to the test in early December when, after six years of discussion and 26.5 million pounds of halibut dumped, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) is poised to reduce a fixed cap of more than 4 million pounds by bottom trawlers targeting other flatfish in halibut nursery grounds of the Bering Sea.
More than 3,000 commercial halibut fishermen, 955 charter operators, several thousand halibut sport fishermen and over 4,000 subsistence harvesters in Alaska and the West Coast are affected by halibut bycatch in the Bering Sea, according to Linda Behnken, director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association and a former NPFMC member.
The state of Alaska has a vote on the bycatch reduction options being considered by the NPFMC. Rep. Sarah Vance, of Homer, asked what that position will be.
“We are reviewing all the materials at the present time but we don’t have a position yet on what we’re going to do,” said Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang. “We are going to take a step to have a significant reduction in halibut bycatch, but which alternative would be premature to postulate what we will ultimately support until we’re done reading all the materials in advance of that meeting.”
The 20 bottom trawlers in this bycatch debate are all Seattle-based and owned by “six or so companies,” said NPFMC director Dave Witherell, who also presented at the hearing.
Vincent-Lang quickly came to their defense.
“Although they may be homeported in Seattle, they pay significant fishery landing taxes to the state of Alaska and what we’re seeing is the ownership of these vessels is increasingly becoming Alaska-based with the community development quota groups in Western Alaska basically buying into this industry,” Vincent-Lang said. “That contributes a lot to those coastal economies.”
There are six CDQ groups that represent 65 communities within 50 nautical miles of the Bering Sea coast. All are allocated portions of the region’s catches; all are owners or part owners of large fishing vessels.
Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, of Sitka, asked the state’s perspective on habitat impacts by bottom trawlers on crabs and other species.
“I am going to defer an answer on that because I have not given that a good deal of thought,” Vincent-Lang replied. “I will speak to my staff and promise to get back to you with an assessment on that.”
Rep. Dan Ortiz, of Ketchikan, questioned the makeup of the NPFMC, notably its lack of Indigenous members.
“The appointments of the membership are made by the governors of Alaska and Washington,” said Witherell. “If the governor of Alaska wants to appoint someone who’s Native, the governor can do so.”
The NPFMC makeup is raising eyebrows among Alaskans because a majority of voting members of the council along with the top executives of its 19-member advisory panel have direct ties to the trawl fleets.
The Fisheries Committee members said they were generally dissatisfied with the information they received during the three-hour hearing.
“I also find it very disappointing for the Dunleavy administration, two weeks out from the NPFMC decision, to not verbalize the alternative they support. We want definitive answers and actions and policy direction from them,” Vance said.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy was quick to respond after the committee hearing.
Within two days of the bycatch meeting, he announced formation of a 13-member Alaska Bycatch Review Task Force “to explore the issue of bycatch and provide recommendations to policy makers.” Applications are being accepted now.
“And all three of us were like, isn't it a little late for that?” said committee member Rep. Kevin McCabe, of Big Lake. “Shouldn't we have had a task force to make recommendations to the state (NPFMC) voting member long before this? Why is the state just now seeming to be waking up? So yeah, we are very concerned. It's a shame, if you ask me.”
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