November 14, 2018 — Last winter, something unprecedented happened in Alaska. For the first time on record, there was no sea ice in the northern Bering Sea, and biologists are now scrambling to figure out how that will affect scores of area fisheries – from crab to salmon to rockfish to various pelagic stocks – in the coming years.
Because there are few fisheries in the northern Bering Sea, historically it has not been subject to as much surveying as the southeastern Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. But the boundary between the north and south – set at around 60 degrees north – is for research purposes, and stocks migrate freely over that boundary.
According to Diana Stram, a fisheries analyst and management plan coordinator at the North Pacific Fishery Management Council for the past 16 years, warming waters have highlighted the increasing connectivity between the two sides of the boundary.
“We’ve had the warm blob in the Gulf of Alaska, which caused the huge Gulf cod decline, in addition to the extremely warm waters this year in the Bering Sea, and that has caused a lot of species to move north. So we’re seeing these warm water masses pushing fish north and meanwhile increasing metabolic demands in fish and causing higher mortality,” Stram told SeafoodSource.
When fish like cod and pollock head north, it’s the sea ice that pushes them back down, Stram said. Without that ice, biologists are left in the dark, unsure where stocks end up.
Read the full story at Seafood Source