SFR Uh oh

Sorta fishing-related
wanderingrichard

wanderingrichard

Life of the Party
wanderingrichard said:
www.undercurrentnews.com

US gov't shuts central Gulf of Alaska pollock fishery after 'unprecedented' salmon bycatch incident - Undercurrent News

US gov’t has closed the pollock trawl fishery in the central Gulf of Alaska for the rest of the year after two fishing vessels caught an ‘unprecedented’ amount of Chinook salmon as bycatch
www.undercurrentnews.com www.undercurrentnews.com

This might be why Chinook are hard to find in some places
Click to expand...
I'm glad action was taken, but that whole fishery in SE Alaska needs some serious overhaul. I get that commercial fishing is going to continue to be a thing, and I hate nets in my local river (Columbia) as much as anyone.. but I'd rather the fish have a chance to get back to the river at least. Set up more localized commercial fisheries. Fishing anadramous fish in mixed ocean stocks is not the way.

(granted, this doesn't solve the pollock fishery problem... can't exactly fish for those in a river)
 
Yeah, had me kind of wondering just how that bycatch happened. From my understanding, pollack are bottom fish and the nets are different than those used for salmon ? ( knowing zero about commercial fishing)
 
wanderingrichard said:
Yeah, had me kind of wondering just how that bycatch happened. From my understanding, pollack are bottom fish and the nets are different than those used for salmon ? ( knowing zero about commercial fishing)
Click to expand...
The nets used for the bottom fishery (drag nets) are probably the least specialized nets used in fishing. They basically scour the ocean floor and scoop up anything and everything on or near it, destroying corals and protective structures in the process. Chinook orient near the bottom in places where thise fisheries happen. Bycatch is always significant, and in some cases, it can be nearly catastrophic. Commercial fishers in the open ocean need to get a real job. Their fisheries have become unsustainable and need to go the way of the Dodo bird.
 
If I'm not mistaken, the pollack fishery is a mid-water trawl and not a bottom dragger trawl, the principle difference being where in the water column the gear is deployed and fished. Trawl nets are considered inefficient salmon fishing gear, mainly as I recall, because their fishing speed is slow relative to the swimming speed of salmon. However, all fish (and shrimp) caught in trawls are captured because the victims don't know they are in a net until they find themselves crowded toward the small - cod - end of the net. They get packed in the cod end by newer arrivals long before they can try to escape.

I've heard the pollack fishery described by owners as a "clean" fishery because only about 5% of the total catch is bycatch of unwanted or non-target species. However 5% of a bazillion tons of pollack is still a lot of tons of other fish which includes salmon and halibut. (I've read that the halibut bycatch is larger than the total commercial and sport catch of halibut, so it's pretty disingenuous to disregard or say that bycatch doesn't matter.) The larger question for society - and society is not consulted by the agencies in charge BTW - is whether the trawl fishery that uses relatively low value pollack to provide us with Mrs. Paul's fish sticks and surimi, fake crab meat, is worth the damage to other species and destruction of the ocean environment.
 
Shad said:
The nets used for the bottom fishery (drag nets) are probably the least specialized nets used in fishing. They basically scour the ocean floor and scoop up anything and everything on or near it, destroying corals and protective structures in the process. Chinook orient near the bottom in places where thise fisheries happen. Bycatch is always significant, and in some cases, it can be nearly catastrophic. Commercial fishers in the open ocean need to get a real job. Their fisheries have become unsustainable and need to go the way of the Dodo bird.
Click to expand...

The pollock fishery is not a bottom trawl fishery, and it is incredibly specialized and does huge amounts of work to reduce its bycatch rates. The problem is that the volume of pollock caught is huge. It’s the biggest fishery in the US. So even a tiny percentage of that catch being salmon is a massive amount of salmon.
 
One of the main problems is that international waters are not regulated, and where they do exist through international agreements there's no enforcement.

So the basic economic driver is to plunder and grab everything before the others do so........until the resource is gone. Age old story.

But maybe the world's commercial fisheries will control themselves because they are dependant upon sustainability....as some have asserted! 🤣
 
Last edited:
Salmo_g said:
If I'm not mistaken, the pollack fishery is a mid-water trawl and not a bottom dragger trawl, the principle difference being where in the water column the gear is deployed and fished. Trawl nets are considered inefficient salmon fishing gear, mainly as I recall, because their fishing speed is slow relative to the swimming speed of salmon. However, all fish (and shrimp) caught in trawls are captured because the victims don't know they are in a net until they find themselves crowded toward the small - cod - end of the net. They get packed in the cod end by newer arrivals long before they can try to escape
Click to expand...


Yep, this is true.

Pollock is a mid water fishery. In the late 90s, early 2000s when I worked on Pollock boats the by catch was surprisingly minimal. At times we ran into large numbers of sole, or cod, but overall it was quite clean. Catching salmon was not unheard of, but the amount of salmon that would come up in a bag was literally like a fish or two now and then.

At least with the large company I worked for, there were observers onboard who monitored any by catch quite closely. Obviously this was a long time ago, and not every boat is playing by the rules, so I can't speak to the entire fishery, but my experience showed me that the pollock fishery was quite "clean".

Now, whether or not that fishery is sustainable, or what other impacts it may have I can't say, but IME Pollock boats in general aren't killing a ton of salmon.
 
krusty said:
One of the main problems is that international waters are not regulated, and where they do exist through international agreements there's no enforcement.

So the basic economic driver is to plunder and grab everything before the others do so........until the resource is gone. Age old story.

But maybe the world's commercial fisheries will control themselves because they are dependant upon sustainability....as some have asserted! 🤣
Click to expand...


Probably ought to just form a committee lead by the captains of those commercial vessels. They are, after all, the true stewards of the resource.
 
Thanks for the education on the mid-water fishery, all. They still kill a lot of salmon, but they don't have near the impact on the overall environment that bottom trawling does, so it was wrong to say these were among the "worst."

True also that we don't know what "alarming" bycatch is in this scenario. Possibly, it just means a higher percentage than normal, and lest we forget, more salmon in the bycatch probably indicates more salmon present than expected, which is not necessarily bad.

It's also pretty hard to argue there are a bunch of economically viable alternatives to that kind of fishing. It's about a high volume of small fish, so trying to isolate them better would be horribly inefficient for the price/pound. I personally don't eat much of anything derived from polluck, but a lot of people eat fish sticks, fillet-o-fish sandwiches, and imitation crab, so it would put a meaningful dent in food supply to eliminate or strictly limit those fisheries. A tough nut to Crack, and probably not best solved by the "shut 'em down" strategy I hastily proposed earlier.

I do wish we could do better; it's always frustrating to hear about excessive impacts to dwindling runs of salmon associated with open ocean fisheries, where nobody has much control over the species or origin of the fish they are catching. But maybe we can't....
 
I lived in the Westport area when the joint venture fisheries first started in the 1980’s. For those who don’t know what that entailed, laws were changed to restrict foreign fleets from raping the pollack fisheries within the territorial limit.

The solution was to have American boats do the harvesting and deliver the cod end to the processing boats. Sounds good doesn’t it. Fortunately the American fishers did some testing and discovered that even though the fishery was midwater, salmon were also present in the areas they fished. The skippers I talked to admitted that they could catch salmon just by altering the way they brought the net up. If the American skippers could figure that out in the first month of the joint venture, the vessels from the other countries had it figured out many years before.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top