The fish behind America’s fish sticks is fueling a fight over trawling in Alaska

THE BERING SEA (AP) — The net rose from the heaving Bering Sea swells, packed so tightly with Alaska pollock that their heads squeezed through the webbing.

As the catch spilled onto the deck, other dead marine life came with it: a skate, crabs, jellyfish and, among the most consequential, salmon — the fish at the center of a growing political and cultural fight over industrial trawling in Alaska.

“This is a wild capture fishery so you do run into your nontarget species, and a lot of people have a problem with that,” said Maverick Blake, the boat’s captain. “But this is what it takes to put seafood on the table.”

Blake redirected the boat toward another fishing ground where he hoped to encounter fewer salmon.

Alaska pollock is the second-largest fishery on Earth. It is the fish inside U.S. McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and is also turned into fish sticks and imitation crab. The fishery uses methods that it — and McDonald’s — say are aimed at minimizing environmental impacts, but the nets that catch pollock catch other marine life , too.

Bycatch — marine life caught unintentionally while fishers target something else — makes up 2% of the pollock fishery’s total catch. At the scale of a fishery that harvests billions of pounds of pollock annually, that can mean hundreds of thousands of salmon. Over the last 10 years, Bering Sea pollock trawlers caught an average of about 18,000 Chinook and 288,000 other salmon a year, nearly all of them chum.

Those catches have become especially contentious as salmon runs have collapsed across western Alaska, where dozens of Native communities have relied on salmon for generations. The backlash has spread to smaller commercial and charter fishers who say they, too, are bearing the costs of declining stocks. And trawling and bycatch have become prominent issues in Alaska's midterm elections , with candidates for governor and in the state's closely watched U.S. Senate contest sparring over how aggressively to restrict the industry.

In 2024, Alaska and Canada instated a seven-year ban on Chinook fishing along the Yukon River — one full salmon life cycle — to give depleted populations a chance to rebuild. The Kuskokwim River has faced repeated Chinook and chum closures too, while other Yukon salmon fisheries have also been restricted.

Scientists point to warming waters and changing ocean conditions , not trawl bycatch, as the primary causes of the declines. Warmer oceans can also increase the risk of salmon bycatch by changing where salmon and pollock overlap, according to a 2025 study .

But critics argue bycatch is one of the few sources of fish mortality managers can directly control, and even small losses matter when runs are depleted.

“Each fish is critical to communities along the Yukon River,” said Andrew Seitz, professor of fisheries at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “The people who feel that they bear the brunt of the conservation measures are people along the river.”

During the four days The Associated Press was on the F/V Progress, the vessel caught some 210 chum salmon. Blake, who has spent 13 years in the pollock industry, said avoiding salmon is a central part of his job. He said the search for waters with fewer salmon burned nearly 3,000 gallons (11,360 liters) of fuel. Had he stayed put, he said, the boat could have filled its holds in half a day with far less.

“The subsistence users see this huge machine industry out here harvesting in the ocean and I can understand their frustration,” he said. “I would be upset if somebody told me that I wasn’t allowed to fish like my ancestors had done for thousands of years before.”

Still, Blake and industry representatives call it one of the best managed fisheries in the world. Captains stay in contact with other vessels throughout each trip to share information about salmon concentrations, while the fleet follows weekly closure areas based on reports from the fishing grounds. Every pollock vessel also carries a salmon excluder, a device that gives salmon a way out of the net.

Every salmon caught by the Bering Sea pollock fleet is counted. Trawlers are monitored by observers or cameras, as are deliveries at shoreside processing plants.

“The amount of science and management effort that goes into improving it is basically unprecedented anywhere,” said Matt Tinning, CEO of the At-Sea Processors Association, which represents five Alaska pollock companies. “The system is designed to really incentivize salmon avoidance every day, all the time.”

At 9 a.m. on a July morning in Rampart, an Alaska Native village, about a dozen boats sat moored along the Yukon River. In years past, families would have been pulling nets and carrying salmon to their smokehouses.

The Yukon flows some 1,250 miles (2,010 kilometers) across Alaska before emptying into the Bering Sea. Salmon born in its tributaries migrate to the ocean, spend years feeding at sea, then return to spawn, linking villages like Rampart to the same waters where the pollock fleet fishes.

“We have this big void in our lives right now,” said Brooke Woods, a Koyukon Alaska Native, mother of six and commissioner for the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. “We’ve never had a generation that hasn’t had the opportunity to learn and be taught by elders and parents, and that has such a big impact on our youth.”

Woods’ family once spent long summer days checking nets, cutting fish and tending the smokehouse. This summer, her 3-year-old son, Lewis, watched TV and played in the creek behind the house. He has never set a salmon net with his parents.

Restrictions on their own harvest are difficult to accept when pollock trawlers are fishing offshore.

“You really get angry. Why are we the only ones that have to take the burden?” said Brooke’s mother, Janet Woods.

Rampart has no grocery store, and reaching Fairbanks takes about five hours by boat and road. Families stock up when they travel and have long relied on fishing and hunting to fill their freezers.

Managers briefly opened chum fishing around Rampart this summer, but only with selective gear such as dip nets and beach seines. The Woods family didn't have that equipment.

“You think back in history how they tried to destroy us,” Janet said. “Taking our language, our ceremonies, and now our culture, and it’s been forever a fight for us just to hang on to what very little we have.”

Fish from across the North Pacific mix in the Bering Sea, so a salmon caught in a trawl net could have come from western Alaska, the Pacific Northwest or as far away as Russia or Japan.

NOAA has long used genetic testing to trace salmon bycatch. Since 2024, the Bristol Bay Science and Research Institute has also produced weekly chum bycatch estimates from summer to fall to give the fleet faster information about where western Alaska salmon are showing up.

The results support one of the industry’s main arguments: Most chum caught by pollock trawlers are not from western Alaska. In recent years, western Alaska fish made up an average of about 17% of chum and half of Chinook bycatch.

But even a small share can mean tens of thousands of salmon. In 2021, for example, 9% of chum bycatch came from western Alaska, which equated to more than 51,000 salmon, according to NOAA .

In February, after hearing testimony from more than 170 people, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which sets many of the rules for the Bering Sea fleet, recommended a cap of 45,000 western Alaska chum bycatch. Critics said the limit was too high.

Pollock is big business in Alaska. More than 3 billion pounds (1.36 billion kilograms) were landed from the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska in 2024, worth about $432 million, according to NOAA . While the fishery supports thousands of Alaska jobs, critics note most of the economic benefit flows outside the state, with many of the largest vessels owned by Seattle-area companies.

“We’re trying to play this balancing game” between helping conserve western Alaska salmon for subsistence communities and maintaining “a very valuable economic fishery,” said Abby Duffy, who manages the Bristol Bay institute’s genetics lab in Dutch Harbor.

Small commercial halibut and crab fishers as well as charter operators have echoed the grievances heard along the Yukon. They too have faced shrinking catch limits and closures as stocks decline, while groundfish trawlers continue to catch both species as bycatch.

In 2025 alone, Alaska trawl fisheries discarded some 96 million pounds (44,000 metric tons) of bycatch, according to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council . That's roughly equivalent to 100 fully loaded Boeing 747-8s.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” said Linda Behnken, a commercial fisher and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.

But the larger concern, she said, is what trawling does to the seafloor.

“The habitat damage is really insidious and long lasting,” she said.

Pollock vessels use pelagic, or midwater, trawls that are designed to fish in the water column rather than along the seafloor the way bottom trawls do. But pollock often swim close to the seafloor, so the nets make substantial bottom contact. That contact was evident during the AP’s trip aboard the F/V Progress, when Tanner crabs and basket stars — animals that live on the seafloor — came up in the net.

Meanwhile, some of the same areas that are closed to bottom trawling for the protection of coral, sponges, crab and other marine life are open to pelagic trawlers.

“So they’re dragging in the same areas, defeating the whole purpose of these habitat conservation areas,” said Ben Enticknap, fisheries campaign director at Oceana.

Anti-trawl sentiment has attracted Democrats, Republicans, commercial and sport fishers, and Alaska Native communities — constituencies that don’t often line up on the same side of resource debates.

At least half the original candidates in Alaska's crowded governor’s race took positions critical of trawling or bycatch as contenders across the political spectrum called for tighter restrictions. The governor has significant influence over federal fisheries policy with the power to nominate five of the North Pacific council’s seven appointed voting seats. Several gubernatorial candidates campaigned specifically on using those appointments to shift the council away from trawl interests.

In the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Mary Peltola has called for an end to large factory trawlers, while Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan has introduced legislation aimed at reducing bycatch and keeping trawl gear off the seafloor.

Back in the Bering Sea, Captain Blake kept fishing for pollock. Along the Yukon, the Woods family’s boat remained tied to the bank.

Blake hopes his son will one day fish beside him on the trawler. Brooke Woods hopes her son will one day set a salmon net with her.

“It’s frightening for me to not know if I’ll be able to pass on the same knowledge that my mother, grandmother and parents had,” Woods said. “I’ve heard elders say that if we lose our salmon, that assimilation has worked.”

Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram: @ahammergram .

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment