April 11, 2016 — Stephen Rhoads, a commercial longline fisherman in Alaska’s verdant south-east panhandle, fishes by two rules. One is: stay married. Mr Rhoads has seen countless marriages of fellow fishermen sink under the weight of so many days at sea. The second rule is: use fewer hooks. Mr Rhoads works the Pacific halibut fishery, which opened for business on March 19th, using baited hooks strung off lines as long as three miles. Using as few hooks as possible and carefully targeting the desired species, Mr Rhoads explains, helps keep fish stocks healthy and smaller businesses afloat. To do so, he relies on a crowdsourced compendium of fishermen’s tales.

A war between small family fishing operations and Seattle-based companies pushed Alaska to statehood in 1959. The state’s $6 billion commercial fishing industry still suffers from a David-and-Goliath complex. Over the years, Alaskan halibut fishermen have faced big reductions in their harvest limits while factory trawlers dump millions of pounds of dead halibut overboard as by-catch. Quotas are becoming consolidated into fewer hands, and fishing permits are leaving Alaska’s small coastal communities and heading out of state. The average age of a fisherman in Alaska is 50, an increase of a decade since 1980.

Mr Rhoads is a member of a network started by the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA), which aims to do something about this and to reduce by-catch of sensitive species such as rockfish at the same time. Network fishermen, who numbered only 20 at the project’s start, agreed to share data on where and what they were catching in order to create maps that highlighted areas of high by-catch. Within two years they had reduced accidental rockfish harvest by as much as 20%.

See the full story at The Economist