You know, I've eaten more than my fair share of 'em over a lifetime. But HOLY COW... or should I say Holy Pollock? It blows the mind what it takes to bring one of them bitty little sammiches to market. (OK, so it's more like 10's of millions world wide).

Dragging for pollock....

This is the dirty fishery we all love to hate, but for those who have never seen it in action, it's pretty mind-boggling. Ain't no way in hell removing that much biomass from the North Pacific isn't gonna have greater repercussions for the ecosystem as a whole. Here's a less than brief peek into the world of the pollock dragger.

Factory fishing at it's "finest?" Thanks for posting eyeFISH as I'd seen this before and it's nice to be reminded of what really goes on beyond the horizon...

While waiting for Doc’s presentation, even though the Alaskan North Pacific ground fisheries commands most of the attention, which they should, but let’s not forget the ground fishery off of our coast. I read as a footnote that there was a newspaper story in the Oregonian in the mid 1990’s suggesting more salmon were thrown away off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and California than could be legally caught.

Another account was Bern Shanks, the ex-director of the WDFW, lamenting the Chinook by-catch as obscene and unconscionable.

Bern got it right but his problem was he missjudged the " culture of harvest first " that has and still does dominate WDF&W. Commercial harvest management was the original premise that WDF was formed to govern and it never has moved much off that spot since 1890. They say change is slow but lord these guys makes a glacier look like a race horse!

I hate to say it, but world history tells us the day NMFS/WDFW's management directives change will most likely be the day the net comes up empty.

Weird the video doesn’t work on my computer but does on my phone.

We humans are the most wasteful critters on the planet coming in at 16,093,580,000 pounds of by-catch (discarded waste) from fisheries worldwide according to a recent revised FAO study.

Yes, that is over 16 billion pounds of waste each year.

+1

And that's before you consider how much fish gets thrown out after spoiling in stores... but at least only the target species get wasted that way.

I have just the opposite situation. I looked into it, and Google Chrome no longer supports Java, which is the application used in most old generation streaming applications. Apparently, Google's justification for disabling such plugins is that they are "working with Adobe and others" (yeah, right) to promote HTML 5 as the new Web standard for streaming, etc.

I tried a variety of browsers and they all work including chrome. You sent me in the right direction with looking at my current browser---- problem corrected. Thank you

Ah, so it's just me having issues with Chrome (Android version). Guess I can use Firefox....

I actually tend to think this fishery is one of the more sustainable and efficient fisheries anywhere. The boat in the video was built in the early 80's, so it's been catching that much pollock for over 30 years. Same with every other catcher/processor in the fishery, as there is a finite number of boats that are permitted to fish it. Yet the population remains strong. The pollock population and resulting quota have ebbs and flows from time to time, but are on the upswing right now.

http://www.adn.com/article/20131221/bering-sea-pollock-quota-sees-slight-increase-2014

Bycatch is very closely monitored and regulated as well.

http://alaskafisheries.noaa.gov/sustainablefisheries/bycatch/default.htm

Monitoring bycatch does nothing to justify bycatch, which by all honest accounts has been unacceptably high on chinook (not to mention myriad other species that nobody ever talks about) for as long as commercial trawling has been going on.

At least the polluck appear to be doing well (though I wonder how much that might be due to the fact that the Aleutian Islands population, which is reported to contain 10x the catchable quota for the Bering Sea population, has been closed in favor of protecting sea lions).

As far as sustainability, I wish you are right even though the cards are stacked against the Alaska, WA, OR, and CA ground fishery and there are other issues involved as well shown in the link below.

http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/S98/Tao/bio191cw.html

“FAO estimates that catches of 70% of marine species have reached or exceeded sustainable levels. (FAO Website)”

“The modern approach to avoid overfishing is to establish the amount of maximum sustainable yield (Hagler, 1995). It can be defined as the maximum rate of population removal without jeopardizing the stock for next season (Ricklefs, 1993). Essentially, MSY is a form of brinkmanship in which fishery managers attempt, as a matter of principle, to extract maximum yields from a natural resource, on the assumption that, if they get it wrong one year, they will be able to get right the next. It is by calculating the MSY the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO) reports that 70 percent of the world's commercial fish species are now fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted (Helvarg,1997). MSY is not the perfect answer, but it is the most commonly accepted one. It is subject to inaccurate data from reporting agencies, natural variables such as abnormal climatic events, and the lack of long term historical data for the particular species (Hagler, 1995). It was very difficult for legislative bodies to set fishing limits. The uncertainties involved in estimating fish population led to abuse. It is not uncommon to see old fishing practice to go on while scientific surveys are being conducted....”

Havoc to ecosystems-- "According to David Helvarg in a 1997 article, about 750 million pounds of these casualties (by-catch) were wasted just in the North Pacific fishing grounds. These include dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, seals, and other large animals to smaller sacrifices such as crabs, squids, mollusks, sunfish and so forth. They are valuable members of the marine ecology. With all the mobile members cleaned out, the stationary coral reefs also suffered…"

The conflict of interest between money and environment is a difficult matter to resolve.

“According to one account in a recent report published by David Helvarg, an agent from the National Marine Fisheries Service complained that after a major poacher bust in restricted water, his supervisor told him he can’t put the poacher out of business because the loan for the boat was from the government and needs to be paid off (1997)…”

“Make friends in Washington and that gets the boats in the water. Making the payments on the government loan still take some work. A 1995 report published by Carl Safina, a set of interesting numbers was noted. The annual costs for the fishing industry to catch $70 billion worth of fish was $124 billion. The red ink was filled in by government subsidies. This huge lump of money was given to the industry for the purpose of keeping people employed. The reality is that those employees are hired to destroy their future and ours. This free money in the form of subsidies was luring many people into the industry...”

Good luck in this fishery being different from the majority of other world fisheries.

We should change their name to Cecil!

Let’s don’t forget about the illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) multibillion dollar fisheries. Just in the US alone between 20% and 32% ($1.3–2.1 billion) of wild-caught imported seafood reportedly comes from illegal fisheries.

No reason to not believe that IUU bycatch is a staggering waste as well.