Alaska's salmon deserve better than a war over fisheries

(Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation photo)

By Andrea Keikkala

Last week, I was back home in Juneau, where I grew up and where my connection to Alaska runs deepest. I spent several days on the water with my family fishing for coho and halibut, pulling crab pots and shrimping. I came home with a well-stocked freezer, a taste of home to last the year, and another reminder of just how deeply wild seafood is woven into life in Alaska.

That connection to Alaska’s wild fisheries is personal to me. It is also why I believe we should be able to have open and honest conversations about how our fisheries are managed. Fisheries' politics in Alaska have always been contentious, and complicated management questions can quickly become deeply divisive arguments over which fishery is to blame. That is increasingly the case in conversation about the future of Alaska’s salmon, where concerns about salmon have become intertwined with campaigns against trawl fishing. As Executive Director of United Catcher Boats (UCB), representing the majority of American-owned catcher vessels fishing for pollock and Pacific cod in the Bering Sea, I think there is room in this conversation for something that too often gets lost: context.

The Bering Sea pollock fishery accounts for roughly 90% of the U.S. pollock harvest. Pollock is our nation’s largest fishery, providing approximately 3 billion pounds of American seafood each year. With a fishery of that scale comes an enormous responsibility.

So, what does fishing for pollock in the Bering Sea actually look like, and what does the science tell us about its impact?

Pollock fishermen use pelagic trawl gear. The gear is designed to fish at different depths to target pollock wherever they are in the water column. Fishermen use acoustic technology to locate schools of pollock and position the gear to target them. When pollock are higher in the water column, the gear can be fished higher. When adult pollock gather near the seafloor, portions of the gear can contact the bottom.

Our industry is actively engaged in the Gear Innovation Initiative, working with scientists, fishermen and gear experts to better understand bottom contact. But fisheries management is rarely as simple as changing one thing. Gear changes can also affect our ability to target pollock and avoid prohibited species like salmon and crab. The goal is to keep improving how we fish without creating another problem.

The important question is not whether contact ever occurs. The questions are: Where? How much? What is the habitat? What is the effect? And what does the science tell us?

Those are not questions the fishing industry gets to answer for itself.

The Magnuson-Stevens Act requires NOAA Fisheries and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to identify and protect Essential Fish Habitat as part of federal fisheries management. At least once every five years, that habitat is reviewed using the best available science, including an evaluation of the effects of fishing. The analysis considers where fishing occurs, the gear used, fishing effort, habitat type, and the susceptibility and recovery of different habitats.

The 2023 EFH five-year review updated the Fishing Effects model with additional years of vessel data, new sediment and habitat information, improved habitat maps and longer recovery times for sensitive habitat features. The updated model also incorporated methodological corrections that resulted in a more accurate accounting of trawl impacts.

That last point matters to me.

Science-based management should not mean accepting science only when we like the answer. It means acknowledging uncertainty, correcting mistakes and following the evidence wherever it leads.

After that review in 2023, none of the stock assessment authors recommended that a species be elevated for additional mitigation because of fishing effects on EFH. The North Pacific Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee concluded that adverse effects of fishing on EFH remained “minimal and temporary” in nature.

“Minimal and temporary” is standard fisheries management language. It does not mean fishing has no effect on the seafloor. It means scientists evaluated the fishing activity, habitat and its ability to recover, and determined that the effects did not rise to the level requiring additional mitigation under the federal EFH standard.

That is a very different picture from the narrative increasingly dominating social media: that pollock trawl fishing is responsible for the challenges facing Alaska’s salmon and that banning trawl fisheries would bring salmon back. The reality is far more complex.

A myriad of factors affect salmon abundance and survival, including changing ocean conditions, warming temperatures, freshwater habitat, food availability, predation, disease, incidental bycatch in commercial fisheries, and harvest in commercial, subsistence and recreational salmon fisheries. Reducing those challenges to a single fishery or gear type ignores the complexity and the science needed to understand it.

Those narratives are not spreading by accident. Well-funded environmental advocacy organizations are campaigning and fundraising around trawl fishing, pitting Alaska fishermen against one another. In an election season, candidates are also promising simple solutions to extraordinarily complex fisheries problems. Those promises may make good campaign soundbites, but poorly informed fisheries policy can have devastating ripple effects across fisheries, coastal communities and Alaska’s economy.

The alternative to that rhetoric is not ignoring our impacts. It is doing the hard work of understanding them. Robust science gives us the information to keep improving, and our current monitoring programs give us the accountability to know what is actually happening on the water.

It may surprise many people that the pollock fishery chose to operate under a federal requirement for 100% monitoring. That began with federally trained observers aboard every pollock vessel on every trip and has evolved to include either human observers or multiple cameras aboard every vessel, every trip.

This is independent monitoring and verification, not simply an industry asking the public to take its word for what happens on the water. Catch is accounted for, data are transmitted daily, and fishermen share real-time information to move vessels away from areas where prohibited species such as salmon are encountered.

For 2026, the pollock harvest limit was set 30% below the biological limit and 45% below the overfishing limit. Fishermen, scientists and managers continue working on gear innovation, bycatch avoidance and ways to further minimize our environmental footprint.

That is what responsible fishing looks like to me. Not claiming perfection. Not zero impact. Measuring our impacts, being accountable for them and continually working to do better.

Alaska does not have to choose between salmon and pollock. We do not have to choose between protecting ecosystems and producing food. Complex fisheries do not lend themselves to simple promises, especially promises to ban an entire category of fishing gear encompassing very different designs, fisheries and impacts because it makes for an easy campaign message or fundraiser.

Decisions with consequences across fisheries, coastal communities and Alaska’s economy deserve more than that. And we certainly do not have to tear down one group of Alaska fishermen to celebrate another.

Today, I’m back in Washington state, with coho from Juneau in the smoker and the smell of smoke drifting through my house. A week ago, I was on the water with my family, catching those fish just miles from where I grew up. I’m already missing home.

I know how fortunate I am to have had that experience. For many Alaska families, particularly along the Yukon and Kuskokwim, bringing salmon home has not been possible in recent years. That reality deserves to be taken seriously, and so does the difficult work of understanding why some salmon runs are struggling.

Alaska’s wild salmon deserve to be protected, valued, and understood. So do the fishermen working every day to responsibly harvest the seafood our oceans provide. I am proud of the fishermen I represent and the work being done every day to fish responsibly and continually improve.

None of those things are mutually exclusive. In fact, I believe caring about Alaska means making room for all of them.

• Andrea Keikkala, a former Juneau resident, is the executive director of United Catcher Boats, a Seattle-based trade association representing the independent catcher vessel fleet that harvests wild Alaska pollock and Pacific cod in the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and Gulf of Alaska, as well as Pacific whiting off the West Coast.