fishing planet unique chinook salmon alaska

The Bering Sea, which has long been one of the world’s most productive marine ecosystems, accounts for nearly 40 percent of all seafood caught in the United States, generating billions in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs.

The reasons for the crash of the halibut, crab and salmon populations - a collective disaster that has sucked hundreds of millions of dollars from the Alaskan economy - have been hotly debated for years. And while red king crab and snow crab fisheries have been shuttered this year, the trawl industry has still been permitted to discard up to 4.3 million individual snow crab and 32,000 red king crab though they don’t always reach their cap.

In 2021, when subsistence fishermen were prohibited from fishing for chinook and chum salmon on the Yukon River, pollock boats swept up more than half a million individual salmon from the Bering Sea. Roughly two-thirds of the total halibut caught in the Bering Sea since 2006 has been bycatch taken in trawler nets most of which is dumped. What makes this inequity especially jarring for the captains of halibut, crab and salmon boats is that the trawlers, some as long as a football field, which drag vast nets along the sea bottom, also scoop up millions of pounds of species they don’t actually want, and they throw most of it overboard no matter how valuable it might otherwise be.

The fleet of nearly 250 trawl boats that catch groundfish (species such as pollock and yellowfin sole that congregate on or near the ocean floor), have recorded banner seasons - permitted to bring in between 3 and 4 billion pounds of fish annually for worldwide distribution.

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Fishing planet unique chinook salmon alaska