October 26, 2010 Fish News

Fish News

Oct. 26, 2010

High number of King Salmon Bycatch in Gulf May Prompt New Regulations

Fisheries observers report that pollock trawlers and other commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Alaska have netted more than 58,000 king salmon this year. That’s three times as much as the typical bycatch number in recent years.

“By far, this is the largest (bycatch) we have ever seen,” Josh Keaton, a fisheries manager with the National Marine Fisheries Service, told the Kodiak Daily Mirror. “Hopefully, it means a lot of kings are out there to be caught and they ran into a big pack of them.”

But it could also mean new restrictions or regulations aimed at lowering the bycatch down the road. Bycatch is on the agenda in December for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, but the panel was only scheduled to consider a new paper on the topic.

According to the Anchorage Daily News, most of the bycatch came from the trawl pollock fishery in the last month, mostly in the western gulf. The newspaper says approximately 20 boats from King Cove and Sand Point averaged 3.4 king salmon per metric ton of pollock. That equates to 24,878 fish in 12 days of fishing between Oct. 1 and Oct. 17, 2010. In two regions around Kodiak, boats picked up 11,896 kings this month.

Fishery managers are paying close attention because kings accidentally caught in the Gulf of Alaska may be from endangered stocks from the Lower 48. King salmon tagged from those stocks such as the Upper Willamette and lower Columbia Rivers have been found before in the Gulf of Alaska.

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