The North Pacific Fishery Management Council may be just days away from a decision that could limit the amount of chum salmon that the Bering Sea trawl fleet is allowed to scoop up as bycatch. The move comes after years of calls for change from tribes that say they bear the brunt of conservation in the face of sustained salmon crashes.
The council will weigh five options for dealing with chum salmon bycatch at its meeting in Anchorage this week.
Tribal nonprofits and advocacy groups that represent a vast swath of Western Alaska and western Interior communities have mostly aligned around a combination of restrictions – a hard cap on all chum bycatch, a more severe hard cap where Western Alaska chum are most prevalent, and strengthening the incentive-based regulations already used by the pollock fleet…