Alaska's declining crab population due to trawlers catches attention of lawmaker

Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola’s mounting frustration with the largely Seattle-based pollock industry’s decades-old issue of inadvertently damaging the state’s rapidly declining crab populations and critical habitat for many other species may result in legislation – a move heralded by the scientific and conservation communities.

Members of the scientific community concerned with sustainability and conservation are currently in a deadlock with industrial pollock trawler fleets and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council over federal fishery regulations, including pelagic, or "mid-water" trawling, which uses wide-mouthed nets designed to target schools of Bering Sea Alaskan pollock.

The Alaska Marine Conservation Council released a report in February 2023 analyzing the trawlers’ impact on red king crab habitats following the 2022 closure of the Alaska snow crab fisheries, which is still ongoing, and a two-year closure for Bristol Bay king crab that ended in 2023, underscoring the devastating environmental and financial toll.

“The Council decided not to move forward on refining the definition for pelagic trawling. I'm tired of waiting for them [NPFMC] to do the right thing," Peltola said in a recent statement to USA Today.

“Efforts to close or expand the king crab savings area in the Bering Sea have been rejected by the council and through an emergency action petition by the Department of Commerce Secretary," said the former tribal judge-turned-politician, referring to the impacts on king crab populations and trawler fleets.

Stricter regulations apply to bottom trawling, in which nets continuously contact the ocean floor; these are banned in half of all federal waters due to the severity of damage they are known to cause to marine habitats.

Peltola has asked her staff to look into “legislation that would require the Councils to come up with a more accurate definition of ‘midwater’ trawling that relates to the actual amount of time spent on the bottom.”

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Six of 11 voting members of the NPFMC, appointed by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, were called upon by several scientists in public testimony earlier this year to reassess how the pollock trawler’s nets are legally defined and regulated. While serving as the Executive Director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, Peltola advocated for two voting tribal seats on the NPFMC, and similar efforts are housed in a U.S. House Bill introduced in 2022. The Pacific Fishery Management Council has a voting tribal seat.

Jon Warrenchuk, Oceana Senior Scientist, criticized the Council’s decision to move forward without revising the definition of the industry’s gear because of dated legal thresholds.

“In the last two or three years, it's become apparent that this is largely a greenwashing effort. This is not mid-water pelagic trawl gear that doesn't touch the bottom,” Warrenchuk said in public testimony earlier this year.

In contrast, Glenn Merrill, Director of Government Affairs for Glacier Fish, described the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s five-year review of analyzing the trawl gear's impacts on the ocean floor and its interaction with essential fish habitats as more than acceptable.

There's a very robust process that we go through by looking at essential fish habitat, and it looks at all the different fisheries out there [and] all of the different habitats,” said Merrill, who explained that the process covers over 100 different species and how and where the gear interacts based on observer data.

Merrill said that even if high-end estimates of the nets’ contact with the ocean floor are accurate, “we think that it's still a minimal and temporary impact on the essential fish habitat.”

Warrenchuk argued that NOAA’s methodology is flawed. “They've been assured with models that aren’t necessarily evidence,” he said in describing the essential habitat review process.

“For example … you've got a whole bunch of different kinds of habitat features, sand ripples, big sponges, cobbles, and you've got some soft sea anemones, and after trawling, we still see all this stuff, but we don't see any more sponges,” explained Warrenchuk. “They weigh each habitat feature equally despite different parts of the habitat taking longer to recover.”

Warrenchuk is known in the scientific community for surveys of cold-water corals and other species that led to the federal closure of 370,000 square miles of ocean along the Aleutian chain and in the Gulf of Alaska to bottom trawling in Alaska.

When asked about new efforts to address concerns about the uncounted bycatch, morbidity, and ecological impacts of the trawlers, Eric Deakin, CEO of Coastal Villages, seemed confident that their research would provide an accurate picture.

“We're working on a project this summer where we are going to put some sensors on the nets and actually record contact," said Deakin. “We'll have inertia sensors and depth sensors to be able to tell exactly where the captains fish on a couple of boats. That data is going to be collected, and we'll probably share it with the industry.”

"We have the technology now to have things like sensors and cameras that can tell us exactly where a net is fishing and what is going into it, and I'm looking … to make this technology more economical and available,” said Rep. Peltola, describing ongoing efforts to limit fishing gear impacts on the ocean floor.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alaska crab controversy and trawlers catch the attention of lawmaker