Editors View: Wrestling with Bycatch Means New Thinking Needed
SEAFOODNEWS.COM [The Editors View] by John Sackton - April 9, 2015
Bycatch is becoming a huge issue in Alaska fisheries, even as the industry makes incredible advances in reducing bycatch of all kinds.
Maybe it is time to rethink bycatch.
Our present system - established in laws and regulations, is that bycatch is wrong. Non-target species, and the wrong sizes of fish, should not be caught, and in an ideal world their numbers would be reduced to zero.
So part of the National Standards, under Magnuson Stevens, is to reduce bycatch whenever possible.
In Alaska, many of the rules about bycatch are written into laws. For example, with halibut, it is illegal for anyone with other gear than longline to possess halibut.
There is a great deal of attention paid to prohibited species bycatch, whether it is chinook salmon in pollock trawls, halibut in flatfish trawls, rockfish of the wrong species, or even non-target species such as the short tailed albatross, where a single bird killed by longline can shut down a fishery.
I would argue that the industry as a whole has about reached the limits of bycatch reduction...
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