June 3, 2013 — Have you eaten a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich lately? If you have, you’ve eaten walleye pollock from Alaska. It’s not the fanciest fish in the world. But it’s the largest fishery by weight in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Fishermen landed almost three billion pounds of walleye pollock in 2011. The dockside value of that haul was just under $375 million.
It’s not only a big fishery, it’s also a well-managed one. NOAA Fisheries scientists conduct multiple pollock surveys each year to keep close tabs on the population. That, in turn, allows managers to set catch limits that result in a high but sustainable yield.
There’s very limited scientific data about what the pollock are up to in winter, however, when rough conditions in the Bering Sea make fish surveys difficult and expensive. But Steve Barbeaux, a scientist at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, has come up with a clever solution.
Many pollock boats are big enough to handle winter weather on the Bering Sea, and they fish year round. To find the fish, they use sonar, which displays what’s beneath the boat on a computer screen. Back in 2002, Barbeaux asked a bunch of boat captains if he could hook up external hard drives to their sonar units and keep a running record of everything they saw on screen. The captains agreed.
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