April 23, 2024 — The Emperor Seamount Chain is a massive and richly biodiverse set of underwater mountains stretching about 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) south from the Aleutian Islands in the northwest Pacific. From the 1960s until the 1980s, bottom trawlers plied the area aggressively, decimating deep-sea coral communities and fish stocks, and removing biomass to a degree not observed on any other seamounts in the world. Fishing has decreased greatly since then, but one Japanese trawler has remained active on the seamounts in recent years — and, to conservationists’ disappointment, that trawling is set to continue.
Last week, a proposal to pause the trawling failed to reach a vote at a meeting of the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC), an intergovernmental body that manages fisheries in the North Pacific Ocean, held April 15-18 in Osaka, Japan. The U.S. and Canada put forth the proposal, which called for a pause in trawling on the entire Emperor Seamount Chain and part of the nearby Northwestern Hawaiian Ridge seamounts, pending further research.
The NPFC did pass a separate, Japan-sponsored proposal to regulate fishing of the Pacific saury (Cololabis saira), a small, short-lived silvery fish whose stock is severely depleted.