With Western Alaska Salmon Runs Weak, Managers Set Limits On The Pollock Fleet’s Chum Bycatch

By Yereth Rosen

(Alaska Beacon) -- Federal fishery managers have approved the first-ever mandatory caps on at-sea interception of chum salmon, a fish species critical to Indigenous communities along Alaska’s river systems.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council on Wednesday voted in favor of new limits for the pollock fleet to reduce the amount of chum salmon accidentally caught in trawl nets, a phenomenon known as bycatch.

The compromise, approved at the end of a 10-day council meeting, addresses a yearslong conflict that pitted the in-river salmon fishermen and their Indigenous cultures against the economically important harvesters of Alaska pollock, the top-volume U.S. commercial seafood.

Achieving effective safeguards for Western Alaska chum salmon while balancing needs of all parties amid environmental factors that are out of managers’ control was difficult, Angel Drobnica, the council’s chair, said just before the vote was taken.

“This is the most challenging issue I’ve worked on during my time in this process,” she said, referring to her three years on the full council and six years on the group’s advisory panel. “I believe this motion is durable and enforceable and reflective of input from both sides and has maintained a clear focus on Western Alaska salmon.” 

Salmon bycatch is a hot-button issue in Alaska fisheries. Total amounts of chum salmon accidentally caught in the trawl nets used by the pollock fleet can number in the hundreds of thousands — though the vast majority of the chum salmon intercepted in the Bering Sea in this manner is not of Alaska origin, according to council data.

While bycatch limits have been in place for several years for Chinook salmon, this is the first time managers have imposed limits for chum salmon. Both Pacific salmon species are important to the Yukon and Kuskokwim river system communities, and both have collapsed in recent years, at times prompting complete fishing closures all the way into Canada’s Yukon Territory.

The measure imposing chum bycatch limits, years in the making, included several elements:

• It sets an annual bycatch cap of 45,000 Western Alaska chum salmon.
• It apportions the cap among the different pollock-fishing sectors: at-sea processors, catcher ships that deliver to onshore plants, catcher vessels that deliver to “motherships,” which are vessels that collects harvests; and Community Development Quota organizations, which represent rural and Indigenous communities have invested in the fisheries and are assigned shares of annual groundfish harvests.
• It applies the cap to corridors in the Bering Sea that are known to be used by migrating Western Alaska chum salmon and to the summer months when bycatch of Western Alaska chum is concentrated, then when Alaskans are most affected. The use of corridors is intended to address the fact that the vast majority of chum salmon netted as bycatch in the Bering Sea are fish from Asian hatcheries rather than fish that swim though and spawn in Alaska rivers.
• The approved measure contains triggers that would enforce area-specific pollock trawling shutdowns if bycatch levels are reached.
• The approved measure mandates the use of bycatch-reduction technology and practices that are currently voluntary in the industry. Those include employment of salmon-excluding devices that allow salmon to swim free of nets holding pollock and enhanced communication and record-keeping to broaden knowledge among the fleet, tribal organiziation and members and the general public about potential bycatch hotspots and how to avoid them.

The measure is set to go into effect in 2028.

Managers approved it by an 8-3 vote. One of the dissenters, Seattle-based Jamie Goen, executive director of Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, said the cap was too high.

“This motion is a license to kill 45,000 Western Alaska chum when we have information showing that every salmon that comes back to Western Alaska rivers counts,” she said Wednesday just before the vote was taken. “Every female salmon holds the potential to release thousands of eggs that can grow exponentially to feed in-river communities and keep their cultures alive.”

The reduction in pollock harvesting that would result from a lower cap would be “negligible,” compared to the losses suffered by river communities, she said.

Goen’s comments mirrored a slogan imprinted on wristbands, buttons and other items distributed by tribal groups attending the meeting: “Every Salmon Counts.”

Council member Jon Kurland, who is also director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska fisheries service, said that while the salmon crash has had “devastating effects” in Western Alaska with details that are “heartbreaking,” the socioeconomic benefits of the pollock harvests also need to be considered.

Those include “the family businesses that operate catcher boats, the seafood processing capacity in many remote areas that really needs a steady flow of pollock to process other species for smaller-scale fisheries and the ways that the community development quotas improve people’s lives in 65 Bering Sea communities,” he said.

After the vote, tribal representatives attending the meeting had mixed reactions to the council’s action. In some ways, it was a positive movement, they said.

“It’s a start,” said Charlie Wright, secretary and treasurer of the Tanana Chiefs Conference.

“The pressure is on,” said Eva Burk of Nenana, a tribal representative on the council’s advisory panel.

But Wright, from the Yukon River village of Rampart, and Burk said they were disappointed that the numerical cap was not lower and that the geographic area to which it will apply was not broader.

An organization representing the pollock industry said the council’s action was fair, decision was fair, even though it puts some more burden on pollock harvesters.

“The Council’s decision reflects the seriousness of the challenges facing Western Alaska chum salmon and the complexity of managing a dynamic fishery,” said a statement released by the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. “The pollock industry respects the Council process and remains committed to working within this new framework while continuing to invest in science-based, real-time avoidance tools that have already delivered meaningful reductions in Western Alaska chum bycatch.”

Wednesday’s vote came after four days of often impassioned public testimony sessions that started on Saturday and ran through Tuesday afternoon. An estimated 170 people attending the meeting addressed the council during those days. They included subsistence fishers and leaders of tribal originations along the Yukon and Kuskokwim basins, small-scale pollock harvesters, representatives of fishing companies, Indigenous organizations with investments in the pollock fishery and others.

One of the tribal leaders testifying was Brian Ridley, chief executive of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, an organization of Interior Alaska Athabascan tribal government. TCC and other tribal groups have been seeking the strictest limits possible, he told the council.

For Yukon River communities, salmon fishing closures over the past years have resulted in “food insecurity, starvation, diabetes, cancer and cultural loss,” he said in testimony Saturday.

“Let me be clear: We’re not asking to shut down the pollock fishery. We’re asking for the first real step in sharing the burden of conservation, the same step Yukon fishers began taking decades ago. Our communities have carried the burden alone for more than 20 years. Today, we’re asking the pollock fleet to finally share the burden,” Ridley said.

There were more personal accounts, like one delivered Saturday by Julia Dorris of Kalskag, a village on the middle section of the Kuskokwim River.

“My dad had a dog team. Because of less chum and the restrictions, he no longer had his team. And had to get rid of all the dogs. It was heartbreaking to see a strong person quietly fading,” Dorris said.

The pollock trawl fleet had its defenders as well.

Those included Frank Kelty, a former mayor of Unalaska, and Victor Tutiakoff Sr., the Aleutian Island city’s current mayor. Tutiakoff mentioned that he himself is a subsistence fisher, so he understands subsistence needs. Kelty mentioned the Community Development Quota groups that, under a program established in 1992, comprise villages in different Western Alaska regions that have banded together to invest in Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands fisheries.

“The pollock fishery, as we all know, is the economic engine of Unalaska and other fishery-dependent communities in the Bering Sea region, including the six CDQ groups. A closed or reduced pollock season is devastating,” Kelty told the council.

Unalaska is “a one-horse town” completely dependent on commercial fishing, with the local government highly dependent on fishing-related taxes, he said. “If you have reduced or closed seasons, you see impacts throughout the community. The population reduces, employment at the plants goes away, the school population drops, clinic — it’s just a bad situation,” Kelty said.

Defenders of the pollock industry included Native organizations. One was the Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska, which presented a recently passed resolutionwarning that hard caps on chum bycatch could cause “significant economic risk for Tribal members and for fishery-dependent communities.”

Although they sometimes disagreedabout the role of bycatch, speakers on both sides of the debate agreed that the problems facing Western Alaska chum salmon, as well as the faltering runs of Chinook salmon, are myriad.

Climate change, with effects in both the ocean and in freshwater systems, is a major factor, speakers said. For example, Jacob Ivanoff of Unalakleet, representing the Nome Eskimo Community tribal government, described the masses of fish found dead of heat stroke in rivers in 2019, along with water temperatures that ranged up to 85 degrees during that year’s marine heatwave.

The growing presence of Asian hatchery chum salmon in the Bering Sea is a complicating factor. The flood of new fish, aside from competing with Alaska fish for food and potentially crowding Alaska fish out of the habitat, are dominant in the bycatch numbers.

In past years, genetic testing shows that only about a fifth of the chum salmon netted as bycatch by the Bering Sea pollock fleet has been from Western Alaska, council members said. Most of the rest is from Asian hatcheries, including hatcheries in Russia, though a small portion has also been composed of chum salmon from the state’s more southern Gulf of Alaska waters or from the Pacific Northwest region even farther south.

The total chum salmon bycatch in the pollock fishery in 2025 was about 151,000 fish, according to a report presented to the council early in the meeting. Most of that was hatchery fish. The percentage of bycatch that was fish from Western Alaska rivers was low, but it fluctuates from year to year and even from week to week during harvest seasons, according to genetics information presented by the Bristol Bay Science and Research Institute.

Bycatch concerns go beyond salmon. The term refers to any accidental netting, hooking, entaglement or crushing of an untargeted species. Several types of fish, birds and marine mammals are killed or injured through bycatch in different fisheries. NOAA keeps track of annual bycatch totals.