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THE BERING SEA (AP) — The net rose from the heaving Bering Sea swells, packed so tightly with Alaska pollock that their heads squeezed through the webbing.
As the catch spilled onto the deck, other dead marine life came with it: a skate, crabs, jellyfish and, among the most consequential, salmon — the fish at the center of a growing political and cultural fight over industrial trawling in Alaska.
“This is a wild capture fishery so you do run into your nontarget species, and a lot of people have a problem with that,” said Maverick Blake, the boat’s captain.
“But this is what it takes to put seafood on the table.” Blake redirected the boat toward another fishing ground where he hoped to encounter fewer salmon. Alaska pollock is the second-largest fishery on Earth.
It is the fish inside U.S. McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and is also turned into fish sticks and imitation crab.
The fishery uses methods that it — and McDonald’s — say are aimed at minimizing environmental impacts, but the nets that catch pollock catch other marine life , too. Bycatch — marine life caught unintentionally while fishers target something else — makes up 2% of the pollock fishery’s total catch.
At the sca le of a fishery that harvests billions of pounds of pollock annually, that can mean hundreds of thousands of salmon. Over the last 10 years, Bering Sea pollock trawlers caught an average of about 18,000 Chinook and 288,000 other salmon a year, nearly all of them chum.
Those catches have become especially contentious as salmon runs have collapsed across western Alaska, where dozens of Native communities have relied on salmon for generations.
The backlash has spread to smaller commercial and charter fishers who say they, too, are bearing the costs of declining stocks. And trawling and bycatch have become prominent issues in Alaska’s midterm elections , with candidates for governor and in the state’s closely watched U.S.
Senate contest sparring over how aggressively to restrict the industry. In 2024, Alaska and Canada instated a seven-year ban on Chinook fishing along the Yukon River — one full salmon life cycle — to give depleted populations a chance to rebuild.
The Kuskokwim River has faced repeated Chinook and chum closures too, while other Yukon salmon fisheries have also been restricted. Scientists point to warming waters and changing ocean conditions , not trawl bycatch, as the primary causes of the declines.
Warmer oceans can also increase the risk of salmon bycatch by changing where salmon and pollock overlap, according to a 2025 study . But critics argue bycatch is one of the few sources of fish mortality managers can directly control, and even small losses matter when runs are depleted.
“Each fish is critical to communities along the Yukon River,” said Andrew Seitz, professor of fisheries at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“The people who feel that they bear the brunt of the conservation measures are people along the river.” During the four days The Associated Press was on the F/V Progress, the vessel caught some 210 chum salmon.
Blake, who has spent 13 years in the pollock industry, said avoiding salmon is a central part of his job. He said the search for waters with fewer salmon burned nearly 3,000 gallons of fuel.
Had he stayed put, he said, the boat could have filled its holds in half a day with far less. “The subsistence users see this huge machine industry out here harvesting in the ocean and I can understand their frustration,” he said.
“I would be upset if somebody told me that I wasn’t allowed to fish like my ancestors had done for thousa nds of years before.” Still, Blake and industry representatives call it one of the best managed fisheries in the world.
Captains stay in contact with other vessels throughout each trip to share information about salmon concentrations, while the fleet follows weekly closure areas based on reports from the fishing grounds. Pollock vessels carry salmon excluders, devices which help salmon find a way out of the net.
Every salmon caught by the Bering Sea pollock fleet is counted. Trawlers are monitored by observers or cameras, as are deliveries at shoreside processing plants.
“The amount of science and management effort that goes into improving it is basically unprecedented anywhere,” said Matt Tinning, CEO of the At-Sea Processors Association, which represents five Alaska pollock companies.
“The system is designed to really incentivize salmon avoidance every day, all the time.” At 9 a.m. on a July morning in Rampart, an Alaska Native village, about a dozen boats sat moored along the Yukon River.
In years past, families would have been pulling nets and carrying salmon to their smokehouses. The Yukon flows some 1,250 miles across Alaska before emptying into the Bering Sea.
Salmon born in its tributaries migrate to the ocean, spend years feeding at sea, then return to spawn, linking villages like Rampart to the same waters where the pollock fleet fishes.
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1. Theo dõi thông báo từ cơ quan địa phương tại California.
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