Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Bering Sea bottom trawlers reduce killer whale take this year as new gear shows promise

October 7, 2024 — Trawlers targeting flatfish in the Bering Sea deployed underwater web fences this summer to try to keep killer whales from getting entangled in their nets pulled along the ocean bottom. During a season that stretched from May to September, one killer whale was caught, an improvement from last year when nine whales were accidentally taken.

The web fence stretches across a wide swath of the net mouth, acting as a barrier to whales while not blocking fish passage into the net. And this year’s reduced killer whale toll has left industry officials cautiously optimistic that the fences, when fitted properly to different net designs, can keep the whales from being brought aboard the vessels as bycatch.

“We’re hopeful that we have come up with a good solution here. But these whales are really intelligent. They’re adaptive. And what works one season may not work the next,” said Chris Woodley, executive director of the Groundfish Forum, an industry trade association representing five companies with a fleet of 19 bottom trawlers that catch, process and freeze fish off Alaska.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

OPINION: Loopholes allow some trawlers to drag bottom, harming Alaska fisheries

October 3, 2024 — Most people would agree: a bottom trawler is a trawler that drags the ocean bottom.

Apparently, to those who make the rules, it’s more complicated than that.

Trawlers that drag the bottom between 40% and 100% of the time, depending on vessel type, are currently allowed to trawl in sensitive areas closed, for conservation, to both bottom trawlers and directed fishermen such as crabbers. In the process, these trawlers destroy the ocean floor, molting crab, and the slow-growing cold-water coral habitat essential for healthy ocean ecosystems, halibut populations and crab populations.

The hangup? The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is tasked with regulating trawlers and their impact on communities but whose voting members are mostly trawl industry representatives, does not define bottom-dragging trawlers as trawlers that drag the bottom. Instead, these particular trawlers are defined as midwater, or “pelagic” trawlers, since while their net may drag bottom, the mouth of their nets hovers above the ocean floor.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Lawsuit claims fishery managers have failed to adequately protect Alaska’s coral gardens

August 21, 2024 — Until about 20 years ago, little was known about the abundance of colorful cold-water corals that line sections of the seafloor around Alaska.

Now an environmental group has gone to court to try to compel better protections for those once-secret gardens.

The lawsuit, filed Monday by Oceana in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, accused federal fishery managers of neglecting to safeguard Gulf of Alaska corals, and the sponges that are often found with them, from damages wreaked by bottom trawling.

Bottom trawling is a practice that harvests fish with nets pulled across the seafloor.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service “ignored important obligations” to protect the Gulf of Alaska’s seafloor, under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, the lawsuit said.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

The Supreme Court’s trawl bycatch decision casts a wide net

July 24, 2024 — A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision could have important implications for fisheries in Alaska.

Last month, the Supreme Court overturned a legal principle called Chevron deference, named after the case that established it. For 40 years, that principle gave federal agencies wide authority to interpret the gray area in laws passed by Congress. Now, more of that authority will go to judges.

The decision came after a legal battle over who should pay for bycatch monitors on trawl boats. The potential effects extend to all federally regulated industries — including fisheries.

Many trawl boats are required to have bycatch observers onboard. And in Alaska, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council can have trawl boats pay for those observers. That’s the law. It’s spelled out in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs commercial fishing.

But that act is not clear on who should pay for bycatch observers elsewhere. In the Atlantic, a federal agency created a similar funding program and a trawling business sued.

“And so (the National Marine Fisheries Service) used its agency authority to interpret the statute and fill in the gap and say, ‘Well, you know, we’re going to do what we do in the North Pacific region here in the Atlantic region.’ And the court said, ‘Nope, you can’t do that,’” said Anna Crary, an environmental lawyer at the firm Landye Bennett Blumstein LLP in Anchorage. She’s been watching that court case.

That Supreme Court decision, in a case known as Loper Bright, was a reversal of policy the Court formed in a 1984 environmental lawsuit called Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council.

That doctrine said that when federal laws are vague, federal agencies should fill in the gaps, and courts should defer to the expertise of those agencies. Crary said that understanding of agency power has become a baseline assumption.

“Administrative law, unbeknownst to many people, really forms the backbone of what we perceive as our everyday life, as modern society. But the extent to which this decision destabilizes that, I think is quite profound,” Crary said.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Trawl industry responds to concerns of vessels fishing too close to Kuskokwim Bay

June 13, 2024 — Coastal communities near the mouth of the Kuskokwim River have expressed concern about bottom-trawling vessels operating in close proximity to where salmon enter the river. But trawl industry leaders say that this is nothing new.

In recent weeks, posts widely shared on a popular Facebook group critical of the trawl industry have raised issues with vessels apparently just a few miles offshore. The posts on the STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch page featured marine traffic maps showing the location of the trawlers, with one post reading “six trawlers right outside the mouth of Kuskokwim.”

Chris Woodley, executive director of Groundfish Forum, a trawl industry association that represents 17 catcher-processor vessels operating in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands regions, testified about the issue before the North Pacific Fishery Management Council during its June 7 meeting in Kodiak.

Read the full article at KYUK

Bottom trawling experiment delayed in Northern Bering Sea

March 7, 2024 — NOAA postponed the Northern Bering Sea Effects of Trawling Study (NETS), a controversial bottom trawling experiment. Tribal and environmental groups, determined to sue to block the project’s progress, accepted the decision to postpone the study this year.

NETS was set to be an experiment to examine the impacts of commercial bottom trawling in a banned area in the Bering Sea. According to the official study, shifts in fish populations due to climate change may increase the need for bottom trawling in the future. Bottom trawling, also known as dragging on the seafloor, produces about one-half as much food as global beef production, according to a 2022 NF article.

The study was designed to be a multi-year project conducted by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). The decision to postpone came in a letter from the director of NOAA Fisheries, Janet Coit, who directly emailed tribal organizations that opposed the study.

The letter sent on Feb. 23 said, “To provide more space for continued dialogue, NOAA Fisheries has decided not to move forward with the NETS research project this year. We value our responsibilities to and partnerships with Alaska Native communities and want to ensure NOAA is creating space for respectful dialogue and trust building.”

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

Trawling Boats Are Hauling Up Ancient Carbon From the Ocean Depths

January 18, 2024 — The fillet of flounder sitting on your plate comes with a severe environmental cost. To catch it, a ship running on fossil fuels spewed greenhouse gases as it dragged a trawl net across the seafloor, devastating the ecosystems in its path. Obvious enough. But new research shows that the consequences extend even further: Trawl nets are hauling up both food and a huge amount of carbon that’s supposed to be sequestered in the murky depths.

In a paper publishing in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers have tallied up an estimate of how much seafloor carbon the bottom-trawling industry stirs into the water and how much of that is released into the air as CO2 each year, exacerbating global warming. It turns out to be double the annual fossil fuel emissions produced by the entire world’s 4 million–vessel fishing fleet.

“At least 55 to 60 percent of the CO2 created by trawling—scraping the seafloor—is going to come into the atmosphere within nine years,” says lead author and ecosystem ecologist Trisha Atwood, who focuses on carbon cycling at Utah State University and National Geographic’s Pristine Seas program. “It now suggests that countries should be looking at this industry, and that their carbon footprint goes a lot further than maybe they were thinking, just in terms of the amount of gas that they burned to get out to their fishing grounds.”

Read the full article at Wired

Bottom-trawl gear to blame for most of this year’s fishery-related killer whale deaths, NOAA says

December 5, 2023 — A federal investigation into the unusually large number of Bering Sea and Aleutian killer whales found dead this summer determined that most but not all of the deaths were killed by entanglement in fishing gear.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center on Friday released some details about the deaths in the Bering Sea and Aleutians, which had spurred sharp criticism of seafood trawling practices.

Of the nine killer whales that were found ensnared in bottom-trawling gear, six were killed by those entanglements but two others were already dead before they were netted, the investigation found. The other whale was seriously injured by the gear entanglement but escaped alive, the agency said.

In addition to the nine whales found in bottom-trawl gear, there were two other cases of dead killer whales found entangled in other types of fishing gear.

Read the full story at the Alaska Beacon

Response paper aims to debunk the theory that bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel

December 2, 2023 — Bottom trawling, a fishing method that entails towing a net along the ocean floor to capture target species, does not release as much carbon as air travel, according to a response paper that sought to debunk research published in 2021 and picked up by global media outlets, including The Guardian.

The response paper, “Quantifying the carbon benefits of ending bottom trawling,” released in May 2023, claims that Sala et al. – the authors of the original research – overestimated trawling’s carbon output by two to three orders of magnitude, or 100 to 1,000 times more than they should have, in the model they used, contending that the discrepancies are due to incorrect fundamental assumptions of the carbon cycle and flawed validation.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

New review shows bottom trawling is sustainable (when well-managed)

July 20, 2023 — The following is an excerpt from an article published by Sustainable Fisheries UW:

Seafood produced by bottom trawling can have a lower environmental impact than chicken or pork, according to a new review paper published yesterday. Writing in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, Hilborn et al. 2023 argues that banning bottom trawling would increase negative environmental impacts by increasing terrestrial protein production.

Hilborn et al. 2023, reviewed dozens of papers about bottom trawling impact, including stock sustainability, bycatch, ecosystem impact, and carbon footprint. Though bottom trawling is generally the most impactful kind of fishing, well-managed bottom trawl fisheries produce food with a much lower environmental impact than any terrestrial animal protein.

A review paper summarizes the current knowledge on a particular topic by combing through and presenting conclusions from recent publications. In this case, Hilborn et al. 2023 reviewed the existing literature on the environmental impacts of bottom trawling and summarized four major impacts: Sustainability of target species, impact on benthic ecosystems, bycatch and discard, carbon emissions.

The key to reducing impacts and sustaining fisheries is management. Bottom trawling can be a low-impact form of food production in places with effective management. Bottom trawling can be highly destructive in areas with little capacity for environmental management (like many developing nations in Asia).

In this post, we summarize the findings from the four major impacts, discuss what effective bottom trawling management looks like, and compare the environmental impact of bottom trawling to other forms of food production.

Read the full article at Sustainable Fisheries UW