Migrating Alaskan pollock are creating the potential for a new dispute with Russia
The popular fish appear to be moving to higher latitudes as waters warm. A billion-dollar industry is at stake.
DUTCH HARBOR, ALASKA — America's biggest catch lands here and at nearby ports every year: more than 2 billion pounds of Alaskan pollock to feed a global appetite for fish sticks, fast-food sandwiches and imitation crabmeat.
The tightly managed Alaskan pollock fishery has been a rare success story in the U.S., which has seen the collapse of species such as New England cod and now imports 80% of its seafood.
Yet the careful management that helped make Alaskan pollock a billion-dollar industry could unravel as the planet warms. Pollock and other fish in the Bering Sea are moving to higher latitudes as winter ice retreats and water temperatures rise.
Alaskan pollock are becoming Russian pollock, swimming across an international boundary in search of food and setting off what could become a geopolitical dispute.
Andrew Rosenberg, former deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, expects the pollock to be a test case in an emerging pattern of fish driven by climate change across jurisdictional boundaries.
"It will be a food security issue and has an enormous potential for political upheaval," said Rosenberg, now a professor at the University of New Hampshire. "We aren't getting along that well with the Russians now."
A warming trend in the Bering Sea has forced fishermen like Jim Summers to motor 360 miles in his 191-foot trawler, the Aurora, to reach profitable fishing grounds. Docked here recently, he gingerly worked a hydraulic lever, unleashing 30,000 pounds of the mottled, pale-bellied pollock onto the deck.
"It feels like every year we're going farther and farther north," Summers said. "It used to be that most of our trips found fish near Dutch Harbor, with an occasional run up toward Russia. Now it has flipped."
While Summers repositioned the net, a pair of 12-inch-diameter hoses vacuumed more than 1 million pounds of fish from the hold of the ship into a dockside processing plant. Once there, the fish coursed through a labyrinth of tanks, conveyor belts, and automated slicing, dicing and washing machines that turned the fish into fillets or fish paste.
This flow of white flesh was then frozen in blocks and stacked in containers on freighters, destined to be breaded and fried at McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants, or shipped to Europe for fish-and-chips platters or to Japan for surimi, the fake crab at the heart of California rolls in sushi bars.
