Commercial fisheries may soon be at the Bering Strait’s doorstep

THIRD PLACE TEAM— Team 6, Bradley Kishbaugh and Mike Morgan, finished the Iron Dog race in third place with a trail time of 53 hours 57 minutes 22 sec.

Sea ice loss, warming waters and the northward expansion of fish species like pollock are all contributing to a pattern in the Bering Strait region known as “borealization.”

That means the Arctic ecosystem is becoming more like the boreal region to the south.

Those changes have raised the possibility of new commercial fisheries opening in the northern Bering Sea and even further north in the Chukchi Sea.

Franz Mueter, a scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences in Juneau, gave a Strait Science lecture last week to discuss research that might influence management decisions under these changing conditions.

There has been a longstanding moratorium on commercial fishing in U.S. federal waters north of the Bering Strait. State waters in the Arctic, however, host some small commercial fishing harvests.

But large commercial fisheries are already sitting right at the “doorsteps” to the Arctic—in particular, around the Arctic’s main inflow shelves of the Barents Sea and the Bering Sea, Mueter said. And these fisheries are “poised to move north if fish move north—when fish move north,” he said.

Indeed, as Arctic waters warm, some commercially important stocks are already on the move.

In general, the northern Bering Sea used to have a much lower density of fish than the southern Bering Sea, where most of the large commercial fisheries have occurred, Mueter said. But the density of fish became uniform across the north and south under warmer conditions in 2018-2019.

Mueter showed maps of Pacific cod distribution over several recent years. In a more typical year, such as 2010, the fish tended to be distributed in the Bering Sea at latitudes

STRAIT SCIENCE — Franz Mueter gave a Strait Science lecture to talk about the potential fisheries moving northward as the climate changes. The graph here shows how the density of fish in the Bering Sea general declines as one goes further north. But under warm conditions, such as the region saw in 2018-2019, fish density is relatively uniform across the Bering Sea.

Photo by Tom Stokes