The Arctic Storm, a Bering Sea trawler/Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers photo
Did trawlers cause AK salmon disaster?
A news analysis
Almost 18 million pink salmon, along with 13 million sockeye and smaller numbers of chum and coho salmon, went missing in Alaska this year.
Alaska hasn’t seen a fisheries disaster like this since the 1970s, and state officials are already calling for federal aid.
All told, it would appear that 37.5 million salmon that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game forecast would return didn’t return. And they turned a forecast already on the small side into the worst return in the 21st Century.
Damn that trawler bycatch!
Propaganda
If you’ve been watching TV in the run-up to this year’s elections, or turning to YouTube to view the highlights of National Football League (NFL) preseason and now regular season games, you’ve surely heard all about the evils of trawl bycatch.
It seems that every time I turn to YouTube, Vince Beltrami, the former president of the Alaska AFL-CIO, pops up in front of his drift boat on the Kenai River to tell Alaskans how trawlers have destroyed the fishing on the state’s most popular waterway, and how this is all the fault of Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska.
Normally, a link to this video would be provided so readers could view it. But such a link is impossible to find. Google AI says this is “because political action groups like the 907 Initiative run their ad campaigns targeting trawling as unlisted commercial placements on YouTube, the specific video files are hidden from public channels and their public channel library.” Whether this is accurate or not is hard to say given how often AI is off the mark, but it would seem a plausible explanation.
Now back to the anti-trawl pitch itself.
Either Beltrami has a very short memory and has forgotten the 4.3 million sockeye that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported returning to plug the Kenai with fish last year; he’s totally ignorant of what salmon trawlers actually haul in as bycatch; or he’s a big, fat Fibber McGee happy to tell whatever story necessary to minimize Sullivan’s chances of re-election.
Pick one or more, as you choose.
The reality is that the trawlers catch almost no sockeye, the biggest attraction on the Kenai. And the Bristol Bay fishery wouldn’t be the most financially powerful of Alaska salmon fisheries if the trawlers tried to catch sockeye, because they could catch a lot of sockeye if they targeted them.
Bering Sea trawlers – the chief bogeyman in the trawl debate – do, on the other hand, catch a few Bristol Bay and Kenai king salmon, but the number is minuscule. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA), which has genetically traced these trawl-caught Chinook, ie. king salmon, report the bycatch of “NW Alaska” Chinook as 1,825 at its highest in recent years.
Not many Kenai kings
The Kenai and five of its tributaries make up six of the 19 rivers tracked in the NW Alaska group. Most of the major producers of Chinook in the Cook Inlet region are on that list, but not all.
Apportioning the catch is difficult because of this lack of detail, but if, as a rough measure, one were to divide that 1,825 by 19 and then multiply the sum by six to spread the fish evenly among all 19 rivers and then lump the Kenai watershed kings together, the number of kings credited to the Kenai would equal 576.
The Alaska Fish and Game uses a rather sophisticated sonar to ‘estimate’ the number of late-run Chinook entering the Kenai every summer. The agency does not provide a margin of error for this salmon counter, but in general these systems, when used in rivers similar to the Kenai, are reported to be accurate to within 5 to 15 percent.
The sonar recorded a return of 9,803 salmon to the Kenai this year. Five percent of that is 490, which is just below the estimated trawl bycatch. The Kenai return last year was 15,015. Five percent of that is 750.
So, to put this simply, the Kenai king salmon bycatch in the trawl fleet is just barely within the margin of error for the Kenai late-run Chinook count, or actually outside of the margin of error, rendering it largely meaningless.
If a fishery is to be blamed for the decline in Kenai Chinook, it would be easier to blame the commercial set gillnet fisheries of the Kenai coast, which were at one time harvesting kings at the rate of 10,000 to 20,000 per year, with later research showing 70 percent of those fish (7,000 to 14,000 per year) were Kenai kings.
One could argue the river has never recovered from the years of heavy gillnet fishing, but it would be a fallacious argument, as is the argument that the Bering Sea trawl fishery is the cause of depressed Kenai king returns.
Despite this, Bering Sea bycatch has become ‘the’ political bogeyman in the 49th state this year.
Why?
Fishtics, the politics of fish
One can only speculate as to the reasons. It could be that a bogeyman is great for diverting attention from the open-ocean, Alaska salmon farming (ie. ‘ranching’) shown to be detrimental to high-value salmon species like sockeye and coho, and possibly Chinook.
This year’s salmon harvest collapse focused around Prince William Sound hatcheries, which failed to deliver a fraction of their promised return of 14.7 million pink salmon. The best argument for such a failure is that young hatchery fish overloaded the nearshore environment to the detriment of both themselves and wild fish.
You can compare the situation to a farmer putting cattle on a pasture with little grass. The more cattle you put on bad pasture, the greater the die-off is going to be. And that appears to be what happened in the Sound to the detriment of the hatchery fish, with an apparent ripple-on effect for wild pinks and sockeye both in the Copper River, just south of the Sound, and the Kenai River, just north of the Sound.
The forecast of wild pinks for the Sound called for a harvest of 3.9 million. The total Sound harvest of “wild-caught pinks,” which includes wild fish and straying hatchery fish or those intercepted on their way to a hatchery, came to only 3.8 million.
A Copper River forecast calling for a catch of 1.25 million wild and hatchery sockeye produced a harvest of only 601,000. And the results were even worse in Cook Inlet to the north, where a forecast that called for a catch of more than 6 million sockeye (5.6 million in the Upper Inlet and 469,000 in the Lower Inlet) resulted in the harvest of but 970,000.
It is impossible to blame trawlers for these losses when the data indicates they catch almost no sockeye or pink salmon. What they mainly catch is chum salmon, and the studies done by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which has genetically tested chum, estimate that 75 to 80 percent of those fish are of Japanese or Russian origin.
The center also notes that when it comes to this bogeyman fishery for pollock in the Bering Sea, “the relative bycatch during the fishery is low, averaging approximately
1.2 percent of total removals by weight, compared to the estimated bycatch
of 11 percent for all Alaska fisheries and the average nationwide bycatch estimates that approach 22 percent by weight.”
That somewhat overestimates the weight of bycatch, as well, because 24 percent of the Bering Sea bycatch is comprised of jellyfish. Other Alaska fisheries don’t even bother to report their jellyfish catch, and a lot of them don’t report any bycatch. Nobody knows how many starry flounder and spiny dogfish have been caught in gillnets in Cook Inlet and tossed away dead, but most biologists believe the poundage is significant.
Despite this, the trawl fleet has become the bogeyman. It could be because, as previously mentioned, it works well as a distraction. It could be because a sizeable part of the fleet is Seattle-based, and thus Alaskans detest it.
It could be because someone hates poor Catholics who still eat fish sticks on Fridays. Or….
Russian influence?
It could all be due to Russian social media tampering, given that the Russians have more to gain from a ban on U.S. trawling than anyone, including Alaska salmon fishermen of any stripe.
A ban on trawling would save some Russian salmon, but more than that, it would give the Russians a monopoly on the pollock that provide the ingredients for fish sticks around the world. The Russians already harvest about twice as much Bering Sea pollock as does the U.S.
But the volume of their harvests is limited in part by the U.S. take. No matter how much the U.S. and Russia dislike each other at the moment, they are – in the Bering Sea – tied together by a common interest.
If they overfish what is now a sustainably managed pollock stock, everybody loses. So both countries set their harvest limits with an eye as to what the other side is doing in a fishery where the trawlers from the two nations often fish within sight of each other.
If the U.S. banned trawling in the Bering Sea, thus removing its harvests from the management equation and in the process creating a pollock reserve to the east of the international dateline, Russia would surely up its harvest.
By how much? Who knows, but possibly by close to what the U.S. takes now, and some of those fish might even end up coming from U.S. waters because without U.S. trawlers out there keeping an eye on straying Russian trawlers, there wouldn’t be much to discourage a Russian skipper from ‘accidentally’ wandering a few miles east across the International Date Line.
Letting the Russians catch all Bering Sea pollock would, however, end any discussions about bycatch, because the Russians don’t report it. It’s not even clear if they have any as defined by U.S. economic standards.
When it comes to the Bering Sea, U.S. bycatch is defined as the fish NOAA legally prohibits selling.
The Russians appear to sell the chum, Chinook and any other non-Pollock species of value that turn up in their pollock trawls, and thus the fish aren’t bycatch as officially cataloged under U.S. economic terms.
One needs to understand there are two definitions of bycatch in play. The biological definition is the capture of any “non-target species” of fish or marine life. The economic definition is the capture of anything that cannot be sold, such as salmon, which is banned from sale by law, or jellyfish, a form of marine life for which there is no market.
The federal government created the economic definition to discourage fishermen from trying to catch valuable, non-target species. The thinking was, and is, that fishermen will avoid catching a lot of fish they can’t sell because it’s a waste of time, and time is money.
It might sound a little far-fetched to suggest the Russians would engage in social media tampering on this issue, but compared to trying to swing a national election in that way, this is nothing. And it’s cheap.
You wouldn’t have to slip much money to some social media influencers to have them get on board, and it might be even cheaper to fire up a team of bots to comment on the anti-trawling nonsense on the Facebook pages of a few well-meaning fools to hype things up.
It’s hard to believe this would make any difference in the big picture, if only because it’s hard to believe that the federal government, which manages the Bering Sea pollock fishery, would decide that shutting down the largest, protein-producing marine fishery in the country is in the national interest.
But who knows. And if you’re a Russian, what’s to lose in throwing some chump change at a few anti-trawl crusaders who think that trawlers are Alaska’s biggest salmon management problem?
Unfortunately, the reality is that they’re not. Not by a long shot. No matter what the propaganda on the tube might profess.
Categories: Commentary
