Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock

by Kevin M. Bailey

Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock. Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America—the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars. But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse.

In Billion-Dollar Fish , Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, and economics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers.

Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.

Genres: Nonfiction, Natural History, Food

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Steve]

While you are probably unfamiliar with the taxon Gadus chalcogramma, or its common name, Alaska pollock, you are most certainly familiar with its taste. When we eat fish sticks, a fast-food fish sandwich, or imitation crab legs, the fish we’re eating is most likely Alaska pollock. At the time of writing, pollock accounted for 40% of the marine fish harvest in American waters, representing the most lucrative single species. Mr. Bailey provides a solid introduction to the terminology, politics, business and science of marine management, finessing his way through the morass of polarized, competing public arguments. One sentence in particular caught my eye:

When there is an economic stake, whether that is related to corporate profits or environmental fund-raising, it has the appearance of agenda-driven science to me, analyses done for the purpose of finding a specific result.

Sound familiar?

This work reflects on Hugo Grotius’ Mare Liberum, The Free Sea, written in 1609, brings us aboard a Japanese factory ship, discusses the Norwegian interest in the Bering Sea pollock fishery and raises comparisons to the collapse of the California sardine, Peruvian anchoveta, and North Atlantic cod populations. Though I felt the book could be better organized, this was a worthwhile, educational read.

[James Mize · Rating 2 out of 5]

As the title suggests - the origins, growth, and development of the world's greatest food fishery is a story that has not been told. Unfortunately, the title is more apt than the author may have intended, as much of the story remains untold in his book.

The author, himself a fisheries stock assessment scientist, decently presents concepts related to the fishery science. He has also done an admirable job of surveying the history of the development of the fishery prior to "Americanization." I found these parts of the book informative and appreciate his notes and bibliography in support of his narration. Less well presented are the socioeconomic, political, or legal aspects of the current management of the fishery. Sources cited are anemic, often relying only on a handful of personal interviews and biased news articles culled from the Internet, despite easily accessible and more thorough academic sources.

As a result, the author glibly glosses over key components of the management of the fishery, missing the critical nuance that makes this story worthy of telling. Short shrift is given to Alaska's experience with individual fishing quotas for halibut and sablefish, a key part of understanding how and why the American Fisheries Act (AFA) came to pass. Likewise, he fails to describe the underpinnings, benefits, and limitations of cooperative fishery management programs that are the backbone of AFA. Similarly, there is no discussion of the policy considerations of the ten National Standards adopted in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. A single sentence (on page 137) mentions the provision of the fishery management plan that places a 2 million metric ton cap on total groundfish removals from the Bering Sea, but omits any discussion of its alleged economic and political origins, the enduring mythology of its conservation rationale, its enshrinement in federal legislation, or its continuing part in constraining catches to well below the levels allowed by scientific stock assessments.

What a pity. Given the title and description of the book, I had hoped to learn more from the author about this important fishery. As it was, it was okay, but not as great as I had hoped.

[Megsie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m very conflicted about giving this book a review— Kevin Bailey has done something extreeemely challenging, which is to try to explain how a US fishery is managed and why, including the ecology of the fish and the political history of the fishery. It is an admirable effort. I felt like he mostly wrote at a level for the fisheries-literate— but then lapses into explaining, for example, what carrying capacity is for several paragraphs. I thought the ecological explanations were not super great, and that most of the time he was doing the dance all science writers must do—trying to make all your sources happy with how you represented them and their work, AND being accurate about uncertainty—but he stuck too far on the safe side of that, putting in too much detail in a sporadic way that made it hard to tell what was essential. As far as fisheries books goes, it’s fine...and it was fun to read about my colleagues :)

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually really enjoyed this! The beginning few chapters read a lot like a textbook (granted it basically is one), but I really enjoyed learning about the life cycle of pollock. I'm currently a fisheries observer and sadly they do not teach that in our training. I am currently on one of the vessels that is covered in this book so it was kinda neat to get the history of the industry as well as specific boats/companies.

[J J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book by a former Senior Scientist of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center of the NOAA is fascinating, humorous, important, and informative. Makes me wonder why some books (like Michael Pollan's) about certain fish and foods and the systems that determine their fates are so much better known than others.

Ten years after the 2013 publication of this book, Alaska walleye pollock is America's largest commercial fishery by volume (https://media.fisheries.noaa.gov/2022...) raking in $420 million a year and contributing to $2.3 billion in exports as surimi (Japanese-invented fish paste in everything from fish cakes to imitation crab to odeng). The fish is hugely desired by countries across the Pacific, too, making it quite the symbol of U.S. relations with Russia and Northeast Asia.

A takeaway I didn't expect is how much the history of high seas fishing in the Bering Sea and the rest of the North Pacific is encased in Cold War politics...even if it totally makes sense for these shared waters.

Japan started trawl fishing farther and farther out from its own shores in the late 1800s in the interest of feeding its own mouths and then making money off of Korean and Chinese demand for pollock and its roe. After WWII and concurrently to the raging Korean War next door, the U.S. handed the "rights" to fish in distant waters back to its former arch enemy Japan in order to secure a capitalist point of control in the Asia-Pacific region to buffer against Communist Russia and China.

And it was only in the 1960s, as Russia's recovering fishing fleets became more powerful and got too close to American waters and the lucrative king crab population collapsed that the U.S. started caring about pollock (now in all our fish sticks and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches from McDonald's). This desire to get in on the pollock pie, and the wish to keep more offshore oil to ourselves, resulted in America's extension of its exclusive economic zone from 3 miles to 200 miles off shore in 1976! This extension pushed foreign ships from Japan, Korea, China, Norway, Canada, Russia, and the like into an area devoid of jurisdiction nicknamed the Donut Hole. The tragedy of the commons played out in perfect form, and by the time an international moratorium was imposed in 1993, a pollock collapse three times as big as the famous collapse of Atlantic cod had occurred. No one really even knew or cared, and the population never recovered. People still don't really know about it and hold pollock up as the best crowd-pleasing fish that isn't at risk of depletion.

Right now, there are about five remaining pollock fisheries in the waters off of Alaska and they are extremely closely managed, so populations haven't collapsed...YET. Meanwhile, the demand in other countries along the Pacific rim is only increasing. Korea, a huge historic consumer of pollock and its roe (whereas Japan has by now far overtaken them in volume of consumption), is in a geopolitical pickle over this resource as much as anything else, pressured to import what some consider its national fish from nearby Russia.

This isn't even a complete understanding of what has happened and what is happening in concern to pollock fisheries. This is all just to convey the Pandora's box of implications to global food security and international relations today contained in this single, still-overlooked fish.

[Jon Wlasiuk · Rating 3 out of 5]

In writing a detailed history of the commercial Alaska Pollock fishery, Bailey invites us to consider if government-sanctioned monopoly might be the future of the seas.

[Grrlscientist · Rating 4 out of 5]

What do fish sticks, imitation crab meat and McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches have in common? They are all made from the snow-white flesh of Alaska pollock, Gadus chalcogramma. This silvery bespeckled species of cod lives fast and — thanks to a sea crammed with fishing fleets — dies young. Nevertheless, this desirable fish is the dominant species found throughout the subarctic coastal systems of the North Pacific Ocean, with especially large concentrations in the stormy eastern Bering Sea. Alaska pollock, sometimes referred to as “white gold” by fishermen, is the preferred prey for halibut, cod, sea lions and seals, a variety of seabird species, as well as for human school children throughout the US and the UK.

So popular is Alaska pollock that it comprises 45% of all marine fish harvested in American waters. It also is highly vulnerable to overfishing, which raises the question whether it is possible to maintain a sustainable and profitable fishery when a single vessel can catch half a million dollars of fish in just 30 minutes?

This is the main question posed by Kevin Bailey, a retired NOAA fisheries biologist, in his book, Billion-Dollar Fish: the Untold Story of Alaska Pollock . In this fascinating book, Dr Bailey takes a deep dive into the astonishing complexities involved in how commercial fisheries have been managed in the United States since the industrial revolution, and how this affects and converges with international politics, economics and business, and with the ecology of these fish and the other animals that depend upon them.

Dr Bailey details the drama and the history of the Alaska pollock fishery from the viewpoints of its participants: the fishermen, environmentalists, scientists and the politicians. Dr Bailey, who is an accomplished storyteller, also shares often humorous personal experiences about his life at sea, and interweaves captivating stories of adventure and heroism and controversy with the biology and ecology of pollock.

Although much of the pollock fishery remains viable today, Dr Bailey doesn’t shy away from detailing its failures, such as the disaster that occurred in ‘the Donut Hole’, a formerly rich pollock spawning area in the central Bering Sea that was overfished until it collapsed in the mid-1980s. We also learn about other collapsed fisheries, including California sardine, Peruvian anchoveta, and North Atlantic cod — will the Alaska pollock fishery also collapse? Can we recognize and avert an imminent collapse?

This educational story is an important and well-documented case study that will be appreciated by fisheries students and scientists and others who work in the Bering Sea, as well as those who want to learn more about the uncertain future of our environment and its living resources.


NOTE: Originally published at Forbes.com on 28 August 2021.

[Johanna Haas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thorough and detailed - this book tells all the tales of the North Pacific pollock fishery - from its beginnings to its rationalization to today's uncertainty. Includes interesting stories and personalities in the science, economics, and politics.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent balanced review of the history of the management and development of the Alaskan Pollock Fishery.

[Alisha Falberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting! I learned a lot and, better yet, it's pertinent to my job :)