Bycatch ≠ Waste
Bycatch” does not mean “waste.”
Bycatch. That word’s getting thrown around a lot right now, especially with politics heating up, and most of the time it’s either misunderstood or flat out used wrong.
I’ve been in the Bering Sea pollock fishery my whole life. Second generation. And I think there needs to be some straight clarification on what “bycatch” actually means.
By definition, it’s simple: it’s anything we catch that isn’t our target species. For us, that means anything that isn’t pollock. That’s it. What it does not mean is “wasted fish.” But that’s how it gets talked about.
Every fishery in the world has bycatch. Longline, pot, gillnet, everything. But for whatever reason, the word only seems to come up when people are talking about trawling.
Now here’s where people get sideways on the numbers. The BSAI pollock fishery runs at about a 1% bycatch rate, which is actually one of the cleanest in the world. But yeah, it’s a big fishery. This year’s quota is around 1.375 million metric tons or over 3 billion pounds of pollock. So people hear “1%” and then hear “30 million pounds” and think that’s 30 million pounds of fish getting dumped over the side.
That’s not reality. Nothing gets shoveled over the side. Zero. Everything that comes up in the net goes into the tanks and gets delivered. Period. We’ve got cameras on deck 24/7, observers, full accountability. There’s no hiding anything even if someone wanted to.
Most of that “bycatch” is made up of species that we’re allowed to retain. That fish gets processed and sold, same as pollock. It’s used. The only species we’re not allowed to process and sell are what’s called prohibited species. Which are salmon, crab, halibut, and herring. And even then, it’s not as simple as “waste.” Salmon and halibut that come up in food-grade condition get donated through SeaShare and end up in food banks.
So when you hear a number like 30 million pounds of bycatch, what that actually means is total weight of everything that isn’t pollock. Not waste. On average, of that 30 million lbs, somewhere around 75–90% of that is species we’re allowed to keep, process, and sell.
So yeah, bycatch is real. It exists in every fishery. But in the pollock fishery, it does not mean what a lot of people think it means. At the end of the day, “bycatch” just means it wasn’t the fish we were targeting. It doesn’t mean it was thrown away.
And if people are going to have opinions about this fishery, they should at least start with that part right.