In 11 days in October of 2010, approximately 20 vessels participating in a pollock fishery in the Gulf of Alaska accidentally caught 28,000 Chinook salmon. This event was the ‘D’ season pollock fishery in the Western Regulatory Area (see Figure 21). To review from Chapter One, regulators annually create one overarching quota for pollock in the Gulf of Alaska (Gulf), which they split across four pollock seasons (A, B, C, D), each of which occurs in areas 610, 620, and 630. Each of the four seasons start at the same pre-determined, regulatorily-defined dates in each area, two in the winter (A, B) and two in the fall (C, D). Thus, there are twelve annual pollock fisheries in the Gulf. Because pollock and Chinook have similar patterns of activity that recur at certain times of the year in Alaskan waters, vessels tend to incidentally catch Chinook while fishing for pollock.
Chinook, or ‘king,’ salmon is the largest, least abundant, and most expensive of the five salmons caught in Alaska; it is also one of the most culturally important fish to Alaskans, as indicated by its status as the Alaska state fish. Due to regulation, Chinook salmon is ‘bycatch’
when caught in a pollock fishery. Bycatch is “fish other than the primary target species that are caught incidental to the harvest of the primary species” (NOAA, 2006: 5). There are two types of bycatch: organisms that are retained and sold and organisms that are discarded. Fishery
participants (i.e., captains or processing plants) discard catch for one of three reasons:
mechanical and structural limitations (e.g., fish may be too small to process or catch may be too heavy to bring aboard), the catch does not have economic value - or as much economic value as other catch does (e.g., captains may discard pollock in favor of retaining Pacific cod), and regulations that require certain species, when caught in certain fisheries, to be discarded.
Chinook fall in the latter category in all pollock fisheries in Alaska.
The extreme nature of Chinook bycatch in the 2010 D season pollock fishery in the Western Gulf (are 610) is depicted in Figure 22. The rate of bycatch (i.e., the number of Chinook
Figure 22: Seasonal (A, B, C, D) and annual Chinook salmon bycatch rates in the Western Gulf pollock fisheries. A and B seasons are regulatorily scheduled to start on January 20th and end by May 31st, and the C and D seasons are scheduled to begin on August 25th and end by November 1st. The 2010 spike in the D season is the at-sea portion of the Western Gulf bycatch event. (NPFMC, 2011: 57)
caught for every ton of pollock caught) in the event was 3.45, which was 20 times the average rate for the previous seven years (0.17 Chinook/ton of pollock). Put differently, the amount of Chinook salmon bycatch in the Western Gulf in October 2010 was 165 times the amount caught in the same D season fishery in 2009 (six days of fishing) and 19 times the annual amount of Chinook caught in that fishery over the previous five years (est. 1,500 fish), over an average of 14 days of fishing.
While all the pollock and Chinook salmon caught in a trawl net die in the process, due to regulation, all the Chinook salmon must be either discarded or donated to a food bank. Yet, a system for donating bycaught fish to a food bank was not instituted in the Gulf fisheries until 2011. 10 Therefore, all of the Chinook caught in the Western Gulf bycatch event was discarded (approx. 105 tons, or the equivalent of 70 Volkswagens beetles), as was the total amount of Chinook caught by Gulf trawl vessels that year (est. 54,000 fish, 200 tons), all of the Chinook caught by trawl vessels in previous years in the Gulf (avg. 11,000 fish for the previous 15 years, or 40 tons per year). While captains are required to discard Chinook salmon in all trawl fisheries in the Gulf, at the time of this event there was not a limit on the amount they could catch.
The extreme event did not end with a mass catch and discard of Chinook salmon. While the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (Council), which is the body in charge of regulating all federal fisheries in Alaskan waters (see Chapter One, section 5a), had been
analyzing and discussing how to regulate Chinook salmon bycatch in the Gulf trawl fisheries for several years, the 2010 Western Gulf Chinook bycatch event infused Council regulators with a sense of urgency. One reason for this urgency was that the amount of Chinook caught in the 2010 Gulf pollock fisheries violated the Endangered Species Act. Another reason is that the event garnered a relatively high amount of media attention in Alaska, as well as outcry from the salmon industry and from conservation groups. The ensuing regulatory process spanned four pre-determined Council meetings (the Council normally holds five meetings a year, at the same
10In 2013, approximately 20% of the Chinook bycaught in the Gulf was donated to a food bank. The structure for regular food bank donation was instituted largely by efforts of the Kodiak trawl fleet in 2011.
While I have the obtained the donation amounts, in pounds, for 2013 through personal communication with the food bank that manages bycatch donations in Alaska (i.e., SeaShare), I am currently attempting to get additional data on the amount of Chinook bycatch that has been donated since 2011. The
calculation of 20% is as follows: In 2013, 19,373 lbs. of Chinook salmon was donated. At an average of 7.5 lbs. per fish caught in Gulf trawl fisheries (NPFMC, 2011: 117), approx. 2,580 fish were donated.
There were 13,158 Chinook bycaught in the Gulf in 2013. Therefore, the number donated was approximately 20% of the number bycaught.
times each year, but in different locations across Alaska, Washington, and Oregon), which were held in December 2010, February 2011, April 2011, and June 2011. The purpose of this process was “to provide immediate incentive” for the Gulf pollock fleet to reduce their Chinook salmon bycatch (NPFMC, 2011: i). The process culminated in a 25,000 limit on the number of Chinook captains can annually catch Gulf-wide when fishing for pollock. This means that every year the Gulf pollock fleet can catch 25,000 Chinook salmon as bycatch in order to catch their twelve pollock quotas. But this also means that 25,000, or approximately 85 tons, of Chinook salmon can be wasted each year. This limit became active in the fall of 2012 (prorated for mid-year implementation), and was promptly exceeded in the same October fishery that initiated its creation two years earlier.
This is a story about an extreme event, which was constituted by fishing processes at sea that precipitated a regulatory process on land. This regulatory process on land was reciprocally intended to prevent such extreme events at sea from recurring. Figure 23 depicts this extreme event. A “hot spot” is the regulatory and ecological substrate from which large-scale bycatch events emerge. A “lightning strike” is the unpredictable integration of fishing activity and a hot spot; and a large-scale bycatch event is the unchecked proliferation of lightning strikes across multiple vessels. The Western Gulf bycatch event was essentially comprised of A) processes that initially produced lightning strikes from a hot spot and then allowed lightning strikes to
accumulate into a large-scale bycatch event; and, B) the regulatory process aimed at preventing individual lightning strikes from becoming large-scale bycatch events in the future. Thus, as Figure 23 depicts, there are two pathways that can form when captains fish from a hot spot: the production of a lightning strike and the ensuing formation of a large scale bycatch event, or the production of a lightning strike and the avoidance of a large scale bycatch event.
Figure 23 organizes the remainder of this chapter. Hot spots are necessary conditions for a large-scale bycatch event, but they are not sufficient by themselves to create one. They merely provide the backdrop of opportunity. As the backdrop upon which the Western Gulf extreme bycatch event was constructed, the conditions that form hot spots are the subject of section 3 of this chapter, which is constituted by a) a discussion of the materiality of hot spots, both in terms of ecological processes and the ocean bottom, and b) a historical discussion of the regulatory structures that currently create the ‘hot’ in hot spot. In section 4 I analyze the at-sea processes that fostered the development of lightning strikes and the large-scale bycatch event from that hot spot (pathway A), as well as the on-land regulatory process aimed at preventing such future progressions (pathway B). And in the Conclusions section I discuss the issues that led to the extreme bycatch event at sea and how regulators on land attempted to solve those issues.