Trouble looms as Alaskan pollock become Russian

Alaskan pollock are becoming Russian pollock, swimming across an international boundary in search of food and setting off what could become a geopolitical dispute.

Andrew Rosenberg, former deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, expects the pollock to be a test case in an emerging pattern of fish driven by climate change across jurisdictional boundaries.

“It will be a food security issue and has an enormous potential for political upheaval,” said Rosenberg, now a professor at the University of New Hampshire.

A warming trend in the Bering Sea has forced fishermen like Jim Summers to motor 360 miles in his 191-foot trawler, the Aurora, to reach profitable fishing grounds. Docked here recently, he gingerly worked a hydraulic lever, unleashing 30,000 pounds of the mottled, pale-bellied pollock onto the deck.

“It feels like every year we’re going farther and farther north,” Summers said. “It used to be that most of our trips found fish near Dutch Harbor, with an occasional run up toward Russia. Now it has flipped.”

Pollock spawn each winter near the Aleutian Islands and then follow their food north as waters warm in the spring. But the food has shifted farther north with receding sea ice, and now pollock, which follow the northwesterly contour of the continental shelf, are shifting their range ever closer to Russian waters.

Fisheries experts wonder whether such shifts will spark another round of fighting akin to the Icelandic cod wars of the 1950s and 1970s, when fishermen rammed boats, cut nets and exchanged gunfire. The potential for conflict could be realised in the Bering Sea, which is nicknamed America’s fish basket because more than half of all US fish and shellfish are pulled from these waters. Together the US and Russian pollock catches make up the largest human-food fishery in the world.

Already, suspicions are mounting. Russia this summer announced that its pollock catch was up and its stocks were in “good shape”, justifying a higher catch in 2009. Meanwhile, US fisheries managers have scaled back on the catch in recent years. This summer’s survey showed a drop in pollock stocks, prompting calls for further cutbacks.