Calls to “ban trawling” or “end bycatch” in the pollock fishery are reaching a fever-pitch this election season. A survey last year by a progressive polling firm, Data for Progress, found 74% of Alaskans support a federal ban on trawling. The framing of the question surely contributed, but it still suggests an eye-popping level of popular discontent. Political candidates of both parties have noticed.
“The voice of the people is clear,” Sen. Dan Sullivan said in a recent campaign message about trawl bycatch.
To catch you up to speed, we’ve outlined the issue here.
What’s bycatch?
Bycatch is fish (or other marine creatures) caught by accident. Over the past decade, the trawlers targeting pollock in the Bering Sea caught an average of roughly 20,000 king salmon (chinook) in their nets per year. The fleet’s average annual bycatch of chum was nearly 300,000 fish. A small number are processed, frozen and given to hunger relief groups. Mostly, though, they’re discarded as waste.
Meanwhile, in Western Alaska and along the Yukon, chum and king salmon runs have been dismal for years. Villagers who used to rely on salmon as a cultural and dietary mainstay are often not allowed to catch even one king salmon per household.
Is bycatch to blame for dismal chinook and chum runs in Western Alaska?
It’s more complicated than that.
Alaska pollock is one of the world’s largest fisheries. The trawlers say that their annual salmon bycatch is tiny, relative to the nearly 3 billion pounds of pollock they harvest, and that they’re getting better at avoiding salmon. Climate change, they say, is the real culprit in salmon loss. A recent study, for instance, links the collapse of the Yukon king run to a massive marine heatwave.
The pollock industry also points to genetic studies showing that most of the chum bycatch, and a substantial slice of the king bycatch, is not of Alaska origin. More than half the chum bycatch from 2023, for instance, was heading to Russia and Asia.
Critics of trawling aren’t letting the industry off the hook. They say climate change makes it even more important to crackdown on trawler bycatch.
Mary Peltola, bycatch critic and U.S. Senate candidate, put it this way in a recent interview with KYUK: “There aren't many things we can do about acidification of the ocean, or ocean temperature rise. The least we can do is get our arms around factory trawling and all of the metric tons of juvenile halibut, salmon, and crab they're throwing overboard.”
What is trawling and is it the same as bottom trawling?
Trawlers pull a cone-shaped net through the water. The biggest vessels that harvest Bering Sea pollock are huge catcher-processors. They might have 150 workers on board and tow nets a quarter-mile long. Others are smaller catcher boats that deliver to mother ships or to on-shore processors.
The pollock industry frequently points out that their fishery is a “pelagic” or mid-water trawl. Their nets are not designed to drag the bottom.
But they do make frequent contact with the sea floor. And critics say this is one of the ways they damage the marine ecosystem.
This has been going on for years. Why is this a hot topic in Alaska politics now?
A Facebook group called STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch has brought a ton of heat and light to the debate. It has more than 58,000 members and gets hundreds of posts a day, producing a swirl of factual information and science news, inaccuracies and anti-trawl rallying cries.
The group started in 2020, but moderator David Bayes says its member numbers exploded when Peltola was elected to Congress in 2022. Bycatch was her signature issue when she ran for U.S. House that year. As the first Alaska Native member of Congress, she attracted national media attention. Bayes credits her with raising the issue to a statewide and national audience.
Gubernatorial candidates, Republicans and Democrats, are starting to notice and taking their own positions against bycatch.
The trawl industry and its defenders are fighting back with their own political messages and Facebook groups.
Meanwhile, the Alaska Democratic Party and other partisan groups are trying to tag Sen. Dan Sullivan, whom Peltola is now trying to unseat, as the trawling industry’s darling.
I’ve read that Sullivan took in nearly $400,000 in campaign cash from the trawl industry. Is that true?
Not quite. The partisan outfit that compiled the data and sent it around (on condition it not be named as the source) made a spreadsheet error, which is obvious if you check the math on the links they provide to the source materials. The actual number is almost $280,000. That’s since Sullivan took office in 2015 through March, and includes industry PAC money and contributions from trawler executives.
Adding trawl contributions in the latest batch of campaign finance reports bumps his total up by about $6,500. (Those reports, though, were filed just last week and the Federal Election Commission hasn’t finished sorting them, so they’re harder to search.)
Has Peltola ever received campaign cash from the trawl industry?
Yes. Despite running on an anti-bycatch platform in 2022, several trawl executives and an industry PAC contributed to her once she was elected to the House. Those contributions total about $10,000, including $2,000 from the Pacific Seafood Processors Association PAC.
Let’s just look at 2026, now that both Peltola and Sullivan are in the race. Are they still getting money from the trawl industry?
Sullivan received $11,000 in late May from two pollock industry PACs, plus about $2,000 from executives who work for trawl or pollock processing companies.
Peltola received no trawl PAC money this year and $500 from an industry executive.
Who’s the favorite Senate candidate of the anti-bycatch crowd?
The issue transcends party lines.
Some people credit Peltola for getting the ball rolling but say she had her chance and couldn’t get a trawl ban enacted when she was in the U.S. House.
Sen. Sullivan won over some members of the anti-trawl Facebook group by sponsoring bycatch reduction bills. He introduced one in December that was largely focused on research, then filed a more substantial bill in June.
Bayes, who says he hasn’t picked a Senate candidate yet, considers Sullivan’s second bill meaningful legislation. Other members of his Facebook group say Sullivan’s a Johnny-come-lately who did the industry’s bidding for too long.
Peltola’s supporters say Sullivan’s bills are a pale imitation of two bills she introduced in 2024, with some parts word-for-word identical to hers and others watered down.
Debate among anti-bycatch advocates on the Facebook group often centers on which candidate for Senate or governor is the most committed to the issues.
Are the candidates promising to ban trawling, or end bycatch? Is that realistic?
Peltola now calls for an end to “factory trawlers,” meaning the largest vessels, which catch and process pollock at sea. The fleet is mostly based in Seattle.
The owner companies have political juice and substantial support from the Washington and Oregon state delegations to Congress, specifically Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. So getting a federal ban in law would be a heavy lift.
Also, among the catcher-processors is the Northern Hawk, owned by Coastal Villages Region Fund. That’s a nonprofit serving 20 communities in Western Alaska. This adds a political complication to the call for a ban.
It’s worth pointing out that none of the bills Peltola and Sullivan introduced would ban trawling but focus instead on regulating, minimizing and defining. One of Peltola’s bills would limit bottom trawling to certain zones. One of Sullivan’s calls for performance standards for trawl gear and seafloor detection systems.
