Last week Senator Dan Sullivan introduced his Bycatch Reduction Act, a bill that would theoretically strengthen reporting standards and reduce the catastrophic impacts from mid-water and bottom trawl fishing vessels in Alaska.
“Trawling is a form of commercial fishing that’s more on an industrial scale,” said Ryan Astalos, operations director at SalmonState. “They are dragging these giant nets the size of a football field through the water column in search of target species. In the process, they bycatch species that we care about as Alaskans: salmon, halibut, crab, herring. Sometimes they’ve even bycaught orcas.”
According to Alaskans Against Big Trawl, from 2017 to 2025 trawling vessels bycaught 3 million pounds of salmon, 9.26 million pounds of crab, and 57.5 million pounds of halibut. This is all while restrictions encroach ever tighter on the commercial, sport and subsistence fishermen that actually live in the state. This year alone, trawlers in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska have bycaught nearly 600,000 individual crabs, 1.5 million pounds of herring, and over 20,000 Chinook salmon.
Astalos says that NOAA reporting shows an average of 141 million pounds of marine life are bycaught each year by the trawlers. This number, however, is limited by the facts that many species don’t have reporting requirements (so don’t get counted) and there are disjointed reporting rules around species like crabs, where you need the full body in order to add to the count. For example, if you see just a claw or half of a carcass, that wouldn’t count as a unit of bycatch.
“I think that folks are heavily concerned about king salmon – it’s hurting across the state, particularly the Yukon and the Kuskokwim rivers and in South Central,” said Astalos. “I have also had several conversations about halibut. The bycatch numbers are through the roof, and a lot of the time those halibut are actually juveniles, so they’re not even reaching spawning ages.”
This year, 2.6 million pounds of halibut have already been bycaught by trawlers. The impacts really cannot be overstated, and with such obvious implications many Alaskans are actually in rare agreement for a full-out ban on bottom trawling.
“In Alaska you have subsistence fishermen, commercial fishermen, and sport fishermen, and I would say there aren’t a ton of issues that unite those three groups but this is definitely one of them,” said Aubrey Wieber, executive director of the 907 Initiative. “We recently did some research and found that before we even gave people any messaging on the issue and just asked them if they support an outright ban of trawling or very significant regulations of trawling, 70% of people said yes. They aren’t divided along ideological lines, or geography, or gender, age, anything like that – it’s basically 70% (of Alaskans) support a ban of trawling across the board, which I can’t think of another issue so united.”
Many of these trawlers operate out of Seattle and Newport, bringing an out-of-state workforce up to Alaska with no stake in the long term economic, cultural and ecosystem destruction this industry wreaks. Bottom trawling specifically impacts the seafloor – scraping and destroying habitat for bottom dwellers like crab, sea stars and sea cucumber; disturbing and releasing centuries-old carbon sinks; and scooping up and killing literally millions of non-target species along the way.
Despite the undeniable ecosystem destruction associated with trawling, the obvious economic leakage from the state and the largely united Alaskan call for a ban, data from the Federal Election Committee shows that Sullivan has taken nearly $400,000 from individuals and political action committees connected to the trawling industry.
The hypocrisy doesn’t stop there – the bycatch legislation that Sullivan recently introduced is largely based on Mary Peltola’s own 2024 legislation. The main differences with Sullivan’s version of the bill include less priority for small-boats, meaning mom-and-pop operations would compete multi-million dollar corporations for bycatch-reduction gear; a $6 million reduction in the proposal when compared to Peltola’s to go towards NOAA’s Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program; and less of an onus on enforceable geographic limits for trawling compared to the original. All in all, a looser approach than Peltola’s original and resulting slack for Big Trawl.
Beyond this, much of the text of the bill closely tracks Pelotla’s original. Interestingly, however, Sullivan didn’t co-sponsor this original bill back when it was initially introduced back in 2024, leading some to speculate on Sullivan’s strategy during an election cycle.
“Sullivan didn’t co-sponsor that bill (originally), so it’s just interesting. Why is he supporting this now when he didn’t support it then? I would venture to guess that it’s because this is one of the biggest political issues in the state right now, and he’s feeling like he needs to do something to make people think that he’s taking this seriously,” said Wieber. “I would say there are a lot of indicators that he does not take this seriously and I would imagine this bill dies on the vine. (…) This feels like lip service.”
Lip service in that having already accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donations from Big Trawl associates, Sullivan has made clear his ongoing relationship with these actors. Any legislation against them seems more of a virtue signal than a true stance of opposition.
“Sullivan has made no secret about how he feels about the trawling industry over the years, (…) they host fundraisers for him and he’s extremely close with them,” said Wieber. “We’re seeing candidates across the political spectrum messaging against bycatch, and he feels the need to hop on board.”
Rachel Levy is a Juneau-based photojournalist whose work culminates at the intersections of environmental justice, arts and culture, and sustainable tourism. A 2022 graduate of Harvard University's Environmental Policy program, she is also the director of the award-winning documentary "Hidden in Plain Sight" that exposes the labor exploitation and colonial framework burdening Tanzania's safari industry.
