Saving Seafood

A ‘worthwhile effort’ to address trawl bottom contact

May 19, 2025 — Jon Kurland, Alaska regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, agreed to take questions on the issue of trawl gear touching bottom and the pollock industry’s Gear Innovation Initiative. Here are his responses.

NF: It seems the issue of pollock trawl gear contacting the seafloor has taken on a higher profile lately. Is this true, and if so, why?
Jon Kurland: It’s been gaining attention for a while. A number of stakeholders have raised concerns about unobserved mortality of crabs from pelagic trawls contacting the seafloor as well as impacts to bottom habitats. It was a big topic during the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s review of potential new management measures for the Red King Crab Savings Area in the Bering Sea – an area that is closed to bottom trawling but open to pelagic trawling.

NF: What role have you and Alaska’s fish and game commissioner, Doug Vincent-Lang, played in elevating this issue?
JK: Commissioner Vincent-Lang and I have met with members of the pollock industry about this a number of times. We told them this is an important issue and that we’d like to see the industry take a leadership role in exploring and devising viable solutions to reduce bottom contact in areas where that’s a concern due to potential consequences for unobserved mortality of crabs or impacts to bottom habitats.

NF: Do we know enough now about the actual impact of trawl gear on the bottom and benthic habitat?
JK: It’s important to distinguish between bottom trawls and pelagic trawls. We know that bottom trawls are designed to fish on the bottom, and managers have closed some areas to bottom trawling specifically to avoid those impacts. Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about how much pelagic trawls contact the bottom. We know that fishermen sometimes fish these nets very close to the bottom and make contact with the seafloor, but we don’t have much quantitative data about that.

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

Judge Rejects Need for New EIS in Alaska Trawl Fishing Case

March 27, 2025 — The National Marine Fisheries Service did not violate the National Environmental Policy Act when setting seasons and conditions for pollock trawl fisheries in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, even though the fishery harms Native American tribes in western Alaska, a federal judge ruled March 11.

The case, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska by two consortiums representing 98 Alaskan tribes, claimed that the climate crisis is causing rapid and unprecedented change in the ocean (Clearing Up No. 2136). Plaintiffs claimed that NMFS failed to take those changes into account when setting conditions for the last two groundfish seasons.

Joined by several environmental groups, the tribes asked the court to require NMFS to prepare a new environmental impact statement (EIS) for the trawl fishery, taking climate change into account.

Although District Judge Sharon Gleason agreed with plaintiffs on several of their points, she ultimately ruled against them.

Read the full article at News Data

ALASKA: Pollock trawl closure sends economic ripples across Kodiak as fishermen adapt

November 1, 2024 — Cole Hockema has been fishing since he was a teenager growing up in Oregon. For 12 years now he’s been trawling for pollock in the Gulf of Alaska, but today he’s sitting at home with his young daughters in Kodiak.

“We had lots of projects and stuff scheduled that we wanted to do at the end of the year and now we have a lot of time to do those, but we’re putting those on hold now until next year just because of a lack of money,” Hockema explained.

Hockema captains the Pacific Storm, a 100-foot trawler based out of Kodiak, which his father owns. The vast majority of the Central Gulf of Alaska trawl fleet is made up of local boats like his.

According to the trade group Alaska Groundfish Data Bank, 19 boats were fishing in the Central Gulf of Alaska when the pollock fishery closed on Sept. 25. 15 of those are homeported in Kodiak.

Normally, fishermen like Hockema would be out on the water until early November, when the Gulf of Alaska’s pollock B season typically closes. But this fall season ended just three weeks into fishing, when two vessels incidentally hauled in approximately 2,000 Chinook salmon, which exceeded the fishery’s annual bycatch limit. Hockema said the Pacific Storm was offloading its catch on Sunday, Sept. 22 when they first got the news about the bycatch and he knew the fleet would need to stop fishing immediately.

Bycatch from the trawl fleet has caught a lot of negative attention over the years, especially as king salmon runs decline across the state.

Since the closure, the Central Gulf of Alaska trawl fleet has separated out into a few camps – some are trying to switch into rockfish and or flatfish to make up lost revenue, others are doing a couple trips for Pacific cod, and a few like Hockema are done fishing for the year.

“Yeah we just can’t invest in nicer, better gear to go get this one [Pacific] cod trip,” Hockema said. “And then we just don’t want to take the risk of going backwards out there, messing up gear, ripping up gear, costing us more money.”

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Environmental group seeks limits on Alaska trawling

October 15, 2024 — The international advocacy organization Oceana is pushing for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to take action on trawling. The nonprofit released a statement Oct. 7 calling on the council to limit trawling in the Bering Sea and Alaska fisheries, saying it is a threat to sensitive seafloor habitats.

Trawling involves dragging a large fishing net behind a boat to collect fish. It’s big business: the trawl fishery targeting Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea is the largest fishery in the nation. Critics say trawl gear used in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea makes contact with the seafloor, damaging marine ecosystems.

Ben Enticknap, a scientist and campaign director for Oceana, expressed concerns about the practice, saying trawling “risks damaging sensitive habitats.” He called on the council to impose measures to ensure the gear stays off the bottom.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Multiple groups urge seafloor protections from pelagic trawling

October 15, 2024 — A diverse group of harvesters, conservation entities and others are calling on federal fisheries managers to do more to protect seafloor habitats from midwater trawl nets they say are dragging the bottom of the ocean floor.

Midwater, or pelagic, trawling — used to catch schooling fish like pollock, is supposed to be fished in the water column rather than on the seafloor. For this reason, pelagic trawling is allowed in most conservation areas closed to bottom trawling — a form of fishing where nets are purposely dragged on the seafloor and damage corals, sponges and other living seafloor habitats in the process.

An analysis by the National Marine Fisheries Service indicates that 40% to 100% of the width of pelagic trawl gear fished in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea has been in contact with the seafloor, and that these nets, which range from 50 to 190 yards wide, are dragged for miles.

After hearing extensive testimony during their October meeting in Anchorage, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) called for a special meeting to be held Feb. 3-10 at the Egan Center in Anchorage for an initial review of chum salmon bycatch in these waters. The fishery council is to further consider pelagic trawl seafloor impacts at its June 2025 meeting in Newport, Oregon.

Read the full article at the Cordova Times

Environmental group seeks limits on trawling

October 9, 2024 — The international advocacy organization Oceana is pushing for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to take action on trawling. The nonprofit released a statement Monday calling on the council to limit trawling in the Bering Sea and Alaska fisheries, saying it is a threat to sensitive seafloor habitats.

Trawling involves dragging a large fishing net behind a boat to collect fish. It’s big business: the trawl fishery targeting Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea is the largest fishery in the nation. Critics say trawl gear used in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea makes contact with the seafloor, damaging marine ecosystems.

Ben Enticknap, a scientist and campaign director for Oceana, expressed concerns about the practice, saying trawling “risks damaging sensitive habitats.” He called on the council to impose measures to ensure the gear stays off the bottom.

Read the full article at KYUK

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