May 31, 2019 — Last fall, Adem Boeckmann, a commercial fisherman who lives outside Nome, pulled up some of the pots he uses to fish for crab on the ocean floor.
“Had 10 24-inch cod in each pot,” Boeckmann said. “I never saw anything like that.”
Cod, which is used in fish sticks and fish and chips, is caught in huge numbers by commercial boats in the Bering Sea. But not near Nome – typically, the fish is caught hundreds of miles south. Historically, the ecosystem where Boeckmann fishes has been centered on the ocean floor, without big populations of large fish.
Federal scientists are setting off on their own Bering Sea fishing trip this summer, to investigate whether observations like Boeckmann’s – bolstered by the government’s own previous findings – could be indicators of profound shifts in the ocean ecosystem driven by global warming. The results of the summer fieldwork could have major implications for the Bering Sea’s billion-dollar fisheries, as well as for Alaskans who live, hunt and fish along the Arctic coast.
“Is this part of an environmental shift, where with the warming, the northern Bering Sea is going to become a top-down system?” asked Lyle Britt, a federal fisheries scientist who will spend more than a month at sea this summer. “Or, is this more like an ephemeral trend that just happened because we had an unusually warm year, and things will reset? We don’t really know.”
The surveys are done by the Seattle-based Alaska Fisheries Science Center, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.