DAILY TRIFECTA: Something's Fishy
The industry should be bycatching hell
THE SET-UP: Euphemisms suck. More directly, euphemisms are used to suck the truth out of uncomfortable issues. The great George Carlin was a hyper-vigilant guardian of linguistic honesty in the face of our addiction to soft-selling hard truths with squishy euphemisms.
My attention to these details no doubt comes from Carlin’s presence in my personal pantheon. And I find the language around our use and abuse of animals particularly galling. It starts with “poaching,” a word so inappropriately soft that it actually evokes a gently-cooked egg. Elephants aren’t eggs. And there’s nothing “gentle” about their illegal killings.
While “poaching” is oft-used to describe killings in Africa, the US has embraced the word “harvest” as the preferred euphemism for killing animals in the wild. It’s been adopted by many state-level agencies, particularly in deer hunting states. Maybe one could make an argument that a deer hunter intent on eating venison for the coming year is, in fact, “harvesting” an unlucky animal. Although, we don’t talk about “harvesting” pigs or chickens. We call it “slaughtering.”
Avoiding the ick associated with “slaughtering” and “killing” is particularly important when you want to soft-sell the goal of the pleasure-seeking hunter who kills a mountain lion or a bear or a wolf for a trophy. According to state agencies they are also engaged in the pastoral act of “harvesting.” Of course, they aren’t harvesting a damn thing. They are simply killing for fun and for an ego-boosting trophy they can display … perhaps because their genitalia is not suitable for mounting (pun intended).
When Wyoming or Montana use the warm positivity of “harvest” they’re cynically seeking to soften the PR hit that now comes from thrill-killing animals for no good reason. It’s a tacit admission that trophy hunting is unpopular. It can also be tantamount to a consciousness of guilt.
That’s how I’d describe of one of the most destructive euphemisms, which comes from the big business of industrialized fishing. The word is “bycatch” and the practice it hides is apocalyptic. “Bycatch” refers to the untold tons of sealife “accidentally” ensnared by nets both large and small. Industrial-grade trawlers are particularly egregious. They indiscriminately catch and kill anything and everything that happens to be swimming or floating in the vicinity of their intended target. The largest of these operations leave a trail of death and destruction — a.k.a. “bycatch”— behind them.
It’s an industrial-scale obfuscation of a specious practice the industry calls “harvesting seafood.”
TITLE: The Environmental Costs of Our Fish Sticks
https://jacobin.com/2024/10/fishing-industry-regulations-environment-alaska
EXCERPT: With a sizzle of grease, a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish slides across the sticky drive-through counter in Homer, Alaska. Before being battered and fried, the fish in this sandwich was likely caught along the state’s rugged western coast, in the rapidly warming Bering Sea.
You’ve probably eaten Alaskan pollock, even if you didn’t know it — it’s in fish sticks in school lunches and freezer aisles, sold at Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, and White Castle, mixed into fish-oil supplements, imitation crab meats, and faux salmon dips. Over 2.7 billion pounds of the mottled silver fish are caught annually in one of the world’s most valuable fisheries, representing a market of almost two billion dollars.
While pollock is often held up as a prime example of sustainably sourced seafood — industry groups claim it is “one of the most climate-friendly proteins in the world” — the reality is far more murky.
To get all this fish from the Bering Sea, which provides more than 40 percent of all seafood caught in the United States, factory trawlers drag huge nets that sweep up catches by the ton. Their gear regularly scrapes the bottom of the seafloor for miles at a time, destroying vital, slow-growing habitats. Trawling boats — those that catch species living on the bottom, and those that target pollock — often snag species they don’t intend to, what’s known as bycatch. Regulators reported this included ten orca whales in the Bering Sea last year.
Trawlers’ bycatch also includes failing fisheries like Chinook salmon — whose population has declined so much that residents on the Yukon River who rely on them are prohibited from catching any for the next seven years. Critics warn that years of disrupting marine habitat and food webs have contributed to massive population collapses in other species like seals and crabs.
“They’re destroying the building blocks of the entire ecosystem,” says Kevin Whitworth, the executive director for Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a group representing thirty-three federally recognized tribes along the Kuskokwim River.
Advocates say regulators are ignoring the mounting catastrophe, in part because many members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the federal body that oversees the Bering Sea’s fisheries, have close ties to — and in some cases simultaneously work for — the commercial fleets they manage. Smaller-scale fishermen, lawmakers, and tribal governments say the system is designed to protect the industry’s status quo.
A recent lawsuit against the council claims the regulatory body ignores well-conducted, peer-reviewed studies about trawling’s impacts on the Bering Sea floor, which stretches between Russia’s Siberian coast and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Meanwhile, trawlers receive tax credits for funding research that helps shape council decisions. Even basic information like how often the fleet’s gear is making contact with the bottom has been overlooked, obscuring potential causes for species’ declines.
The council, and several of its members, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
TITLE: Loopholes allow some trawlers to drag bottom, harming Alaska fisheries
https://www.adn.com/opinions/2024/10/02/opinion-loopholes-allow-some-trawlers-to-drag-bottom-harming-alaska-fisheries/
EXCERPTS: Trawlers that drag the bottom between 40% and 100% of the time, depending on vessel type, are currently allowed to trawl in sensitive areas closed, for conservation, to both bottom trawlers and directed fishermen such as crabbers. In the process, these trawlers destroy the ocean floor, molting crab, and the slow-growing cold-water coral habitat essential for healthy ocean ecosystems, halibut populations and crab populations.
The hangup? The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is tasked with regulating trawlers and their impact on communities but whose voting members are mostly trawl industry representatives, does not define bottom-dragging trawlers as trawlers that drag the bottom. Instead, these particular trawlers are defined as midwater, or “pelagic” trawlers, since while their net may drag bottom, the mouth of their nets hovers above the ocean floor.
A recent study has made clear that so-called “midwater” trawlers’ football field-length nets, weighed down with thousands of pounds of target species and bycatch, drag the ocean floor up to 100% of the time, likely harming crab, halibut, coral, and many other ocean-floor species in a way that never comes up to the surface to be counted by observers as bycatch.
When this study’s findings were first brought to light more than two years ago, industry insiders acknowledged it is something they have known was happening for more than three decades.
At its meeting Oct. 3-8, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has an opportunity to close this clear loophole.
Comments from the public were due by Sept. 27. Unfortunately, nine days prior to the comment deadline, the council, which has a long history of making it as difficult as possible for members of the public to engage productively, had not yet posted the discussion paper on pelagic trawl gear definition to which the public is meant, in part, to respond.
The council has had the opportunity to act before, in February of this year, and it failed to do so.
TITLE: Red king crab fishery to reopen despite uncertainty
https://www.nationalfisherman.com/red-king-crab-fishery-to-reopen-despite-uncertainty
EXCERPT: The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) recently revised the 2024-2025 season with an acceptable biological catch of over 4,000 metric tons, and the season is set to open mid-October. That comes after data showed a slight increase in mature male biomass. The stock has seen some signs of life, but the long-term health of red king crab is still in question. ADF&G’s preliminary model points to a better-than-expected female abundance, higher than thresholds seen in previous years, though still far from historical highs.
The closure of the fishery in 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 was a necessary pause after mature female biomass plummeted to concerning lows. However, some scientists insist that the recovery isn’t happening fast enough. They have noted that recruitment, a key to the stock's future, has remained frustratingly low over the last decade.
Even with the reopening in 2023-2024, those fishing Bristol Bay’s waters were no strangers to the challenges. The mid-70s brought an abundance of red king crab, and the early 1980s saw a catastrophic decline.
Now, environmental factors are further muddying the waters. Unfavorable conditions could keep the red king crab from reaching its past stock levels. Without a significant recruitment event, the outlook could turn out bleak. NOAA Fisheries scientists and ADF&G are urging caution and continued tight management practices to protect the stock. A 20% buffer is recommended to preserve the delicate ecosystem and allow some recovery space. The 2024 Bristol Bay Red King Crab Stock Assessment stated, “Reoccurring concerns for this stock are still present (cold pool distributional shifts, declining trends in mature biomass, lack of large recruitment pulses, retrospective patterns), as well as low mature female biomass the last few years, all contribute to a recommended 20% buffer for 2024/25.”
Fishermen, already battling poor projections in other fisheries, such as salmon, are worried about their livelihoods. Bristol Bay sockeye runs are forecast to drop 18% in 2025, and Bering Sea snow crab populations are still reeling from their 2021 collapse. King crab, which was an economic pillar for many Alaskans for decades, now seems to be joining this trend of uncertainty.