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Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock - Hardcover

Bailey, Kevin M.

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9780226022345: Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 022602234X ISBN 13: 9780226022345
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock. Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America—the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars. But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in trouble: in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse.

In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, and economics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers.

Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Kevin M. Bailey is the founding director of the Man & Sea Institute, was affiliate professor for over thirty years at the University of Washington, and was formerly a senior scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

Reviews

It’s the most common fish on America’s tables and in its fast-food restaurants, but few know much about the origins and marketing of Alaska pollock. Netted by fishermen in the Bering Sea, Alaska pollock has done for Pacific fisheries what cod once did for the Atlantic. Ground and processed, Alaska pollock becomes surimi, which goes to table as imitation crabmeat. Cut into shapes, it appears in supermarket freezers as fish sticks and at fast-food restaurants as fish sandwich filling, prized for its “neutral,” nonfishy taste. Biologist Bailey served as an inspector on a Japanese fishing trawler, and this experience led him on a quest to learn as much as possible about this sea creature currently so vital to the world’s tables. He finds pollock populations to be extraordinarily resilient but nevertheless vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey traces the history of fishery regulation back to the seventeenth century, and he tries to identify parallel problems and solutions encountered by the Atlantic cod industries’ boom and bust. --Mark Knoblauch

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BILLION-DOLLAR FISH

THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALASKA POLLOCK

By Kevin M. Bailey

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright ©2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-02234-5

Contents

Preface....................................................................vii
Prologue: Fishing Lessons..................................................1
1 INTRODUCTION White Gold Fever...........................................11
2 A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND From an Inexhaustible Ocean to the Three-Mile 
Limit......................................................................		25
3 FISHING THE HIGH SEAS Japan and the Soviet Union Develop the Alaska 
Pollock Fishery............................................................		46
4 AMERICANIZATION! The Rush for White Gold and the Developing Fishery.....59
5 AN EMPTY DONUT HOLE The Great Collapse of a North Pacific Pollock 
Stock......................................................................		73
6 VIKING INVASION Norway's Link to the Pollock Industry...................89
7 A NEW FISH ON THE BLOCK Advancing Knowledge of Pollock Biology..........109
8 A NEW OCEAN Changing Concepts of Ocean Production and Management of 
Fisheries..................................................................		129
9 FACTORIES OF DOOM The Pollock Fishing Industry Clashes with the 
Environment................................................................		139
10 ALL IN THE FAMILY Olympic Fishing and Domestic Strife in the Industry..152
11 BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER Tranquility after the American Fisheries 
Act........................................................................		174
12 ALASKA POLLOCK'S CHALLENGING FUTURE.....................................199
Appendix A: Terminology....................................................217
Appendix B: Other Abbreviations............................................219
Notes......................................................................221
Bibliography...............................................................247
Index......................................................................265

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: White Gold Fever


They say some waters are too cold even for sharks.MARTIN CRUZ SMITH, in The Polar Star


What makes a good fisherman? Boldness enables him to take risks andintuition guides him in making quick decisions. Thick calluses andstrong hands help with the hard work on deck. Generally, these qualitiesof a good fisherman make for a good businessman as well, andfishing for pollock was to become good business for a young Norwegiannamed Kjell Inge Røkke.

One wintry day in 1980, a trawl was deployed from the Arctic Trawlerinto the dark waters beneath it. The fishing master Erik Breivik, freshfrom Norway, was looking for cod near the bottom. The net spun offthe reel until it was in the water, then the doors, large metal door-shapedslabs that hold the net open from the sides like sails, enteredthe water with a splash. The winch hydraulics moaned in a loud andlow "brrrrmmm" as the thick wire line was played out and the netdescended toward bottom. An hour later the trawl was reeled backin. Now the hydraulics screamed under the load. The crew eagerlyawaited the riches coming up; millions of pounds of fish were therefor whoever had a boat and the nerve to venture into the Bering Seato catch them.

A great catch, fifty thousand pounds of Alaskan groundfish scoopedfrom the bottom of the ocean, neared the surface. Icy sea spraystung unshaven faces, and the smell of fresh fish hung in the air. Hungrygulls circled overhead. A deckhand shouted out, his hand shot upin a closed fist—the universal sign to "halt"—and the Arctic Trawlershuddered from stem to stern, her winches stopped dead. The catchof fish bulging out from the net was so enormous, it split open like azipper and fish spilled out. The net trailed behind for a hundred feet,undulating in the ocean swell. If the huge bag of fish was hauled up thestern ramp, fish would gush out from the wound in the net—sendingmost of the catch back to the sea. A body flashed across the deck andleaped from the stern railing onto the rising and falling codend. Thecrew watched with dropped jaws as the gutsy fisherman clutched thewebbing and scrambled in a crabwalk to the open gash of the net. Ashe bobbed up and down, and stitched the hole, he knew that a slip intothe cold sea was almost certain death.

This time the young fisherman Kjell Inge Røkke was lucky, the netwas mended, and the catch was saved. The winches roared back to lifeand one imagines him riding the bucking trawl back up the stern ramponto the deck in triumph, waving his woolen hat, the crew cheering—amodern day cowboy. A Norwegian cowboy. John Sjong, the skipper ofthe Arctic Trawler, said of the incident, "The next thing I knew he had acouple of needles in his pocket and he ran back on the bag and he sewedit up and saved the tow—he was a hundred feet behind the boat sittingon a bag of codfish." He thought, "Jeez, I wouldn't have done that."

Two years later, Røkke, a high school dropout from Norway's westerncoast, bought his own trawler and fished for pollock in the BeringSea. He teetered on the edge of bankruptcy several times and thenbounced back to found American Seafoods, eventually controlling40% of the pollock harvest. Røkke came to play a small but importantrole in the story of the Alaska pollock fishery. He built on his daringand success as a fisherman, gathered riches in the business world, andmade it to the pages of Forbes magazine's list of the world's wealthiestpeople. In two decades, he went from a deckhand on a fishing boatto a net worth of $3 billion. Røkke had come to the New World andrealized the American Dream. His companions on the Arctic Trawler,Sjong and Breivik, had similar success fishing for pollock. Togetherthey personify the opportunity that the pollock resource presented:great risks were taken and great wealth was gained. These names andothers will weave through the narrative of this story.

Alaska pollock is the shy little sister of the cod fish. Not too manypeople recognize her, but over the past thirty years she's grown up.Now Alaska pollock makes the cod look like a poor cousin. As a seafoodproduct, these days it is ubiquitous. Pollock has been an importantfoodstuff in Japan since the 1960s; the minced meat is pressed andgelatinized into a product called surimi, and the valuable pollock eggsare used in sushi. Surimi can be further processed, adding texture,coloring, and flavoring, to resemble crab and shrimp meat, or madeinto a sausage called kameboko.

When the Alaskan crab populations crashed in the early 1980s,many Americans and Europeans were unwitingly introduced to pollockdisguised as imitation crab. But now the market for pollock hasmatured. The white flesh not only is sent to market as fake crab, butalso is fed as a healthy fish product to US soldiers in Afghanistan and toAmerican children in school lunch programs. Pollock is everywhere.It is the pure white meat in fish sticks bought at Walmart and Filet-O-Fishburgers ordered in McDonald's.

Te current demand for Alaska pollock outstrips the supply. Pollockis the most lucrative marine fish harvest in American waters andcomprises about 40% of the US catch. Since 1950, a total of 187 milliontons of pollock have been mined from the waters of the North PacificOcean (see Figure 1). The fishery in the United States alone has an annualgross value of over $1 billion. Alaska pollock has alternated withthe Peruvian anchoveta as the world's largest fishery since the 1980s,and because the anchovy is primarily reduced to animal feed, pollockcontinues to be the largest fishery for human consumption.

But has the white gold rush ended? Compared with the 1990s, thefishery certainly has changed, maybe even matured. This modern daybuffalo has been domesticated, the pie has been sliced, and the modernday cowboy has been gentrified.


What Do We Know about Pollock and Why Is It So Important?

The scientific name of Alaska pollock, Theragra chalcogramma, derivesfrom the ancient Greek words "Ter," or beast, and "agra," or food. Besidesbeing commercially important, pollock is the dominant speciesin many subarctic coastal ecosystems across the North Pacific Ocean,and hence plays an important ecological role. Befitting its name, pollockis a key prey for beasts of the ocean, marine mammals such asseals and sea lions. They are also prey for seabirds and large piscivorousfishes, such as halibut and cod. Sometimes there are periodicmassive die-offs of seabirds that are blamed on shortages of juvenilepollock. The endangered status of some marine mammal populationshas been atributed to either a lack of pollock or their poor nutritionalvalue as mammal prey. Juvenile pollock are even an important preyof adults. During certain seasons as much as 80% of the diet of adultpollock in the eastern Bering Sea is made of smaller juvenile pollock.

Pollock is a major predator of lower trophic (food chain) levels and acompetitor of small fish and jellyfish for plankton. Cyclic fluctuationsin the abundance of pollock have been linked with climate "regimeshits" that are sometimes associated with changes in the structureof marine ecosystems and with dramatic increases in jellyfish abundancein the Bering Sea.

On the surface Alaska pollock may seem like dull and ordinary fish,but under the water they are masters of their environment, capableof living in a variety of habitats from nearshore eelgrass beds to theopen oceanic waters of the Aleutian Basin. They thrive across a vastgeographical extent that ranges from Puget Sound to the Chukchi Sea,and across the Pacific from Siberia to the Sea of Japan. Pollock survivein a temperature range of one to twelve degrees centigrade, which isfairly broad for northern fishes.

Compared with some modern fishes with lineages originating asearly as 250 million years ago, pollock is a recent arrival on Earth. Itevolved and has lived in the North Pacific Ocean for around three millionyears. But that is old when you think of it—humans have beenon the North American continent for only about fifteen thousandyears. The pollock evolved from an ancestral cod that migrated acrossthe Arctic Ocean during an interglacial period. After some millionsof years of evolution in the Pacific Ocean, another warming periodallowed some individuals to make a reverse migration back into theAtlantic, giving rise to the Alaska pollock's other close relatives Theragrafinmarchicus and Gadus ogak. The Alaska pollock is genetically sosimilar to Atlantic cod that some ichthyologists have suggested thatit be renamed Gadus chalcogramma. Surprisingly, it is more similar toAtlantic cod than to Pacific cod.

Fish populations don't freely wander the world's oceans. Most,like pollock, are structured and organized into geographically basedstocks. Some stocks may exchange individuals through migrationsand straying, and others can be isolated and over time become geneticallydistinct. In pollock there are a number of known geneticallydistinct stocks, and others where there is some limited exchange ofindividuals among them. As we develop more sophisticated tools toexamine the genetic differences, higher resolution of stock structureis obtained. But among scientists studying and managing the populations,there are the lumpers and the splitters—that is, those who believein vast roaming and mingling schools of fish, and those otherswho conceive of a multitude of locally adapted populations. The needto manage stocks on the scale of their own natural structure is a keyaspect to fisheries management that is still mostly unappreciated.

Why are pollock so valuable to harvest? The short answer: volume!But there are other characteristics that make it easy to fish and catch,and qualities that make it a good product. First, the pollock occurs inlarge dense schools off bottom that are almost exclusively pollock.This makes it easy to catch large quantities with relatively little effort.Since they are caught off bottom, there is relatively little dragging ofthe net on bottom, and little disturbance to the bottom habitat. Andbecause the bycatch of other species is low, sorting and processing thecatch is easy.

Pollock can be made into a number of food products. The eggs arehighly valued in Asia. The objective of the winter fishery is to catchfish while they are aggregated in large spawning groups, but beforethe eggs swell with water and are released. The flesh of pollock iswhite with a low fat content and a relatively low parasite load, makingit good for fillets and for minced meat to use in fish sticks and fishburgers or to process into surimi. The liver has a high oil content thatis extracted to make omega oils and the remaining waste is made intomeal, largely used as chicken feed. The only part of the fish not usedpresently is its skin.


Are Pollock and Other Marine Fishes Overharvested?

We expect fish stocks to naturally fluctuate with changes in climate.Usually, during periods of warming or cooling, fish stocks residing atthe polar ends of the population's range increase or decrease accordingly,while the reverse happens at the other end. But in the case ofpollock, several stocks at either end of their range in the North PacificOcean have tended to decrease recently, leading to suspicion ofoverfishing as a contributor to the demise of several stocks. The rolesof climate change versus overfishing in stock declines is an ongoingdebate.

The situation is different in the eastern Bering Sea, where pollock isconsidered one of the world's best-managed populations owing to unusuallystable levels of commercial harvests. It is sometimes referredto as the poster child of marine fisheries management. Is it the managementof this stock that's different, or maybe is there some attributeof the fish there that makes them more resilient to the pressure harvestingputs on them? In most cases, fisheries managers know that inspite of their best efforts, fisheries ebb and flow as their target populationscycle through periods of high and low abundance.

It isn't as though all is calm in the pollock fishery of the stormyBering Sea. In 1992 Ross Anderson of the Seattle Times wrote of theBering Sea pollock, "The industry is careening toward collapse." Butit didn't happen. In fact, the pollock stock increased, peaking at anall-time high a mere three years later. In 2008 another steep declineseemed imminent and the warning flags were again hoisted up theyardarm. The director of the Greenpeace Ocean Campaign, John Hocevar,said, "We are on the cusp of one of the largest fishery collapsesin history." Hocevar added, "Unsustainable fishing rates have beenallowed to continue" and "while the fishing industry and others continueto cite the pollock fishery as a model of fisheries management,the pollock population has declined sharply in recent years." But federalstock assessment specialist Jim Ianelli responded, "I don't thinkwe are overfishing." Once again the stock didn't collapse. Then in 2009,news articles in the Economist and Science magazines expressed morealarm on an international scale about the health of the major stock ofpollock that lives on the eastern Bering Sea shelf. Quotas were decreasedto their lowest levels in 30 years by fisheries managers. Hasthe death knell for pollock sounded?

It seems as if we can't decide, or at least can't agree, whether pollockstocks are collapsing or thriving. Why is it so hard to tell how manyfish are in the ocean? And why is it so difficult to manage them? Willthe pollock have the last laugh as we try to regulate catches and toengineer the population's natural cycles?

At this moment, marine harvest fisheries, including that for pollock,are on the tipping point of revolutionary change. Fisheries managersare under intense scrutiny. Highly publicized articles, often written byresearchers sponsored by the environmental and anti-industrial fishingPew Foundation, warn about drastic fisheries declines and predictthat nothing will remain in the world's oceans but jellyfish in the nearfuture. On the other side of the aisle, scientists, sometimes supportedby the fishing industry and government, argue that there is very littleoverfishing and stocks are recovering. The National Marine FisheriesService (NMFS) points to the number of US stocks that are recoveringfrom overfishing. The Marine Fish Conservation Network claims thatthey are juggling the books by pooling overfished and healthy stocks.

A study led by a Pew Foundation Fellow named Dr. Boris Wormconcluded that most of the world's fisheries would collapse by 2048.Other prominent marine scientists have disagreed with this assessmentof the state of the world's fisheries. One of the world's mosthighly respected fisheries scientists, Dr. Ray Hilborn at the Universityof Washington (who has been described as a "hired gun for thefishing industry"), said of Worm's projection, "It's just mind-bogglingstupid." Worm replied that it was a "news hook to get people's attention."Ten in a later paper, Worm, now partnered with Hilbornhimself, seemed to reconcile their differences (once again supportedby the Pew Foundation). More recent studies indicate that fish stocksaren't as bad off as we once thought, but about 25% of them are stilloverexploited or collapsed.

Other reports have indicated that there is a broader ecosystemconsequence to overfishing and that we are "fishing down" the foodchain. This term means that as the more delectable top predators,such as tuna, swordfish, and salmon, are fished out, industrial fisheriesthen start fishing for the smaller animals that are the prey of thelarger fishes. Thus, human fishers become both highly efficient predatorsand competitors as well. Recently, that conclusion has also beenatacked.

In response to charges of overfishing, the At-Sea Processors Associationsaid, "Could the 'gloom and doom' crowd have it wrong? Universityof Washington professor Ray Hilborn thinks so." Te reportcontinues, "Dr. Hilborn's work ... showed that fish stocks, in fact, areincreasing in abundance." Te word bombs that are lobbed back andforth show the extent to which we are engaged in a major battle for thepublic's attention and favor. Scientific findings announced in press releasesreflect the powerful forces struggling behind the scenes. Whenthere is an economic stake, whether that is related to corporate profitsor environmental fund-raising, it has the appearance of agenda-drivenscience to me, analyses done for the purpose of finding a specificresult.

Large industrial ships may, or may not, be fishing down the foodchain as a consequence of overfishing, but some are fishing lower onthe food chain purposefully. Small pelagic crustaceans, such as krill,and small fishes, such as anchovy, concentrate valuable marine oils.Te omega-3 and omega-6 oils are important in a healthy diet and arein high demand. Norwegian companies are harvesting krill in theAntarctic using new "green technology." In a public relations bid tochange their image, they call their trawlers "Life Science Factories." Bythe way, guess who presides over the company that is competing withwhales and penguins for krill? It is Kjell Inge Røkke from the ArcticTrawler, who now rules over a maritime empire from Norway.


Who Owns the Fish in the Sea?

Te human demand for seafood has simply exceeded the capacity ofthe oceans to produce it. With that in mind, it is frightening to considerChina's emerging demand for seafood and the ensuing pressurethat ocean resources will face in the future. Solutions that are sometimesproposed are to privatize the ocean's resources or to transformthe Earth's seas from hunting grounds to marine farms.


(Continues...)
Excerpted from BILLION-DOLLAR FISH by Kevin M. Bailey. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Publication date
2013
Language
English
ISBN 10 
022602234X
ISBN 13 
9780226022345
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
288
Rating
  • 3.71 out of 5 stars
    56 ratings by Goodreads