What happened to those king salmon caught as bycatch?

A trawl vessel sits at the dock in Kodiak in July. (Photo by Nathaniel Herz/Northern Journal)

Northern Journal last week published a story on how Kodiak-based pollock trawlers unintentionally caught 2,000 king salmon — forcing the closure of a major Gulf of Alaska fishery.

Afterward, a number of readers responded with similar questions: What happened to those salmon? Were they sold? Donated? Thrown back into the water?

Two Kodiak trawlers caught 2,000 king salmon. Now, a whole fishery is closed. The short answer, according to a federal management official: The salmon were “discarded.”

Some additional context: Salmon bycatch is “prohibited from entering commerce,” Josh Keaton, a top management official at the National Marine Fisheries Service, said in a brief call Friday.

“Nobody gets paid,” he said. “The fishermen can’t take them home.”

The salmon caught by the trawlers were small, he said — four pounds, on average, compared to the 10 pounds that the smallest recreationally harvested salmon weigh.

When bycatch is of “marketable size” and suitable for food quality, Kodiak seafood companies will often process the fish and donate them to an Alaska nonprofit group, SeaShare , Keaton added. But in this case, they were probably too small, and also sat in containers for two days as independent fisheries observers took genetic samples of each one, he said.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the closure of the central Gulf of Alaska pollock fishery, in response to the salmon bycatch, continues. The Kodiak Daily Mirror reported Thursday that one of the city’s processing companies, OBI Seafoods, is laying off some 50 workers, with an executive telling the newspaper that remaining workers would see “significantly fewer hours,” as well.

The closure strands about $9 million of raw pollock in the Gulf of Alaska, which would have been processed into $50 million or more of headed and gutted fish, fillets, meal and oil, according to a preliminary analysis by Garrett Evridge, an Alaska fisheries economist.

The state and local government will also lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in fisheries tax revenue, according to Evridge’s analysis.

Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312 . This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link .

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