YAHOO NEWS in : “Fish in American Fishsticks is fueling a fight over trawling in Alaska”.(10-9-26) reports on a major fish controversy with a species are all very familiar with. The fish is the speckled skinned pollock, a 1 to 3 pound semipelagic member of the codfish family. I is blessed or cursed with a tasty snow write flesh which makes it very desirable as a human food fish. If you think you have never encountered one, you would be wrong, Pollock is caught in nets in Alaska, filleted, frozen, then squared up so it could be zapped with microwaves, stuffed onto a soft bun then smeared with tartar sauce and sold to you in a small box. Pollock is not just an American delicacy. It also feeds millions in the UK where it is made into the infamous and unappetizing “fish sticks”. In Germany it is consumed as white fish, and in Asia as faux crab meat (surimi) or faux lobster. Yahoo authors claim the pollock fishery is “the second largest fishery on Earth”.
To exploit this excellent source of fish protein for human consumption about 3.3 billion pounds (1,500,000 metric tons) of pollock are caught annually. Mc Donald’s who uses tons of it for its Fish Filet, and other companies claim this pollock fishery (worth about $500 million dollars annually) is sustainable. With that amount of money involved….it would be difficult to find someone to claim otherwise. But perhaps some unbiased ecologists and marine scientist might.
This author can state: catching 3.3 billion pounds of Alaskan Pollock (Gaddus chalcogrammus ) each year is very likely NOT sustainable. The pollock is a major forage fish preyed upon by other species. Pollock live and die at the mid point of the oceanic food chain. They range in the water column from near the surface in the North Pacific to depths from 300 to1000 feet,
As fingerlings, pollock feed on algae and floating crustaceans (zooplankton) such as copepods and krill (euphausiids) and as they get larger they take shrimp, amphipods, squid, and small fish such as Asian smelt, herring, and even sand launces. In turn, they are the major prey for for larger fish like salmon, cod, halibut, and sea birds, as well as marine mammals such as toothed whales, seals, stellar sea lions and orcas.
When pollock die, or are eaten by predators these wastes drift down to the sea bed where innumerable forms of benthic organisms consume them, benthic fish, detritus feeders, molluscs, sea bed invertebrates, and crustaceans (crabs). When humans remove 3.3 billion pounds of pollock the other forms of life and fish species dependent upon pollock are do not reproduce, and eventually expire as species.
Removing billions of pounds of a forage fish— a foundation species like pollock—means less available for species such as sea birds, salmon, crabs, halibut and orcas. Furthermore, such disruptions in the food chain place stress on the entire system. The entire ecology of the ocean is affected. A harbinger of such distress is the fact that some very recent study of the population (biomass) of pollock in the eastern Bering Sea report a 30% drop in biomass.
Although trawler fishing for pollock is less lethal than other forms of trawling—since pollock shoals swim at mid levels— trawlers drag their nets at these depths, not on the sea floor. U However pollock trawlers still catch millions of non target fish. Often these species are those which prey on pollock…salmon being one of the major species taken as “by-catch”. Once dragged up in a crowed net and spewed on the slimy deck the dead or dying salmon, halibut, etc. are then dumped overboard as waste. In 2025 the Alaska pollock fishery is claimed to have caught and dumped 44,000 metric tons of by catch (or 100 fully loaded 747-8 jet planes worth of smelly fish)
The salmon fisheries are declining each year in Alaska, in recent years the collapse has caused officials to close some salmon fishing altogether. In 2024 Canada and USA instituted a seven year salmon fishing ban on the Yukon River. Salmon fishermen complain that with fewer pollock available as prey the obvious reason is fewer prey species for them to feed on. Government agencies (NOAA fisheries) which control how many fish can be harvested. These estimates are based on reports of fish landed (and the age and health of each species). These agencies often claim that the pollock population is stable and could sustain continued harvesting. In response to the declines in salmon NOAA biologists claim that it is climate warming is the cause of salmon decline ( but when there is no other palatable reason for anything bad these days anthropogenic warming gets the blame). But if that was so,,,pollock would be impacted by warmer water too. If that is true then both salmon fishing and pollock fishing should be limited.
State and Federal government agencies are just that “agencies of the government”. They are sensitive to public opinion and government pressures. They can not be trusted to make scientifically sound decisions.
You can not take billions of pounds of food fish out of a system and not have a deleterious effect on the population of the fish in that system dependent upon that food.
(Strange cases of dying sea mammals, orcas attacking sailboats, disappearing fish species all suggest environmental stress—though not related to the pollock fishery.)
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