North America’s largest seafood harvest, the pollock fishery, would have to shut down if the Bering Sea trawl fleets accidentally caught more than 60,000 chinook salmon under a proposal approved Monday by a federal fishery council. In a voting poll in Anchorage by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council more than 200 people have voted about the scope of the restrictions for the pollock harvest as conservationists and some native villagers lobbied for a much lower chinook limit of some 30,0000 chinook.
The council informed that it has chosen the 60,000 limit as the preferred alternative according Jon Warrenchuk, a representative of Oceana, a marine-conservation group. He also said that chinook are supposed to be reserved for subsistence-sport and commercial-salmon fleets that work in coastal and sometimes inland waters — not the larger trawl fleets that drag their nets through the ocean in search of large tonnages of pollock and other groundfish.
The decision raise grave concern about the effects that the trawl fleets may have on declining runs of Yukon chinook, an important subsistence and commercial for some Western Alaska villages. It is noticed that from centuries the pollock harvest produces more than one million metric tons of pollock that are turned into more $1 billion worth of fillets, surimi paste and other product for a fleet that includes many Washington-based trawlers and factory ships.
Warrenchuk told that chinook salmon are one of the most important fish in Alaska, and we should do all we can to ensure salmon are returning to our rivers to spawn and support salmon fisheries. Since 2007, pollock fishermen have been working hard to reduce their accidental salmon harvest, sharing information about chinook “hot spots” in the Bering Sea. Warenchuk said that in 2008, they caught less than 20,000 chinook and so far this year, their accidental chinook harvest is about 10,000 salmon.
