Trawl fishery boats in Dutch Harbor, Alaska (NOAA Fisheries)

I found the opinion piece “Alaska is sounding the alarm for fisheries in the United States,” by Whit Fosburgh of the Forage Fish Campaign, to be completely false in its attempt to link the tribulations of East Coast fisheries to Alaska.

The most important conclusion we can reach from this commentary is that you don’t comment on the complex issues of someone else’s fisheries without knowing what you are talking about. I wouldn’t even consider commenting on East Coast fisheries, which have been a persistent disaster for decades, since I don’t know enough about them. I would counsel Fosburgh to take this same advice and perhaps even learn something from Alaska’s management of our fisheries.

The difference between the two fisheries is stark.

I assume Fosburgh is referencing the controversy over Alaska’s pollock trawl fleet and bycatch, which is a real issue but has nothing to do with forage fish or the overall health of the fishery in the Bering Sea.

The pollock biomass has ranged between a healthy 8 billion and 10 billion pounds over the past few decades and is the result of sound management decisions. While the focus has been on the fishery, the No. 1 cause of pollock mortality is … pollock. That’s right. Cannibalistic by nature, pollock are responsible for more than 50% of pollock mortality annually, more than all other sources combined.

Next in line are marine mammals, followed by ocean-going birds and, finally, humans at about 10%.

While a fecund female pollock will produce about 1 million seeds per spawn, pollock have no compunction about eating their own babies. As a result, some of the largest year classes of pollock have come from the smallest spawning biomasses, simply because there weren’t enough adults around to eat all the juveniles.

The commercial fishery is managed conservatively, with attention to the overall health of all species in the Bering Sea. Each species is evaluated to determine how much can be taken while maintaining sustainability, which is technically called the total allowable catch, or TAC. If you added up the total TAC for all species in the Bering Sea, you would come up with about 4.2 million metric tons per year.

Nevertheless, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has set an overall cap of 2 million metric tons annually as part of a conservative ecosystem plan, of which the pollock harvest is about 1.2 million metric tons. This cap also recognizes that all these different species eat each other — formally called trophic interactions — and need to be kept in balance.

Of particular concern are Pacific cod, which are the Pac-Men of the ocean floor. Open one of their swollen stomachs, and you will find juvenile crab, pollock, salmon and everything else. I once caught a 5-pound cod with a 2-pound cod in its stomach.

So you want to catch them, but bottom trawling for cod is a concern, as it is for the pollock fishery, where bottom-dragging nets can damage corals, clams, crabs and other species.

This concern can be ameliorated by using pots to catch cod. They are brought aboard alive, where they can be bled and iced, improving product quality and price, and any bycatch species can be released alive without harm. This solution needs to be progressively implemented. Bottom contact by pelagic, or midwater, trawl fisheries for pollock should likewise be minimized.

As for pollock bycatch, it needs to be reduced through excluder nets, trawling speed, avoidance of high-take areas, etc. Completely shutting down the trawl fishery would not address the vast reduction in salmon species caused by environmental changes. To compensate for these environmental effects, in-river enhancement should be evaluated, along with an analysis of the effectiveness of the Yukon River king salmon hatchery in Whitehorse, Canada, which has operated for many years.

Fosburgh would do well to educate himself on the facts of Alaska’s fisheries before trying to link them to the mess on the East Coast. I do wish them well in figuring out their own situation.

Paul Fuhs is a former mayor of Dutch Harbor, a commercial diver in the Bering Sea and a former commissioner of commerce and international trade under Gov. Wally Hickel.

• • •

The Anchorage Daily News welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.