[music playing] NARRATOR: Forget about
the rod and reel. Commercial fishermen
mean business. Often, they bet their lives
on this high-stakes game. With the latest
high-tech electronics and strong and sophisticated
nets, landing the catch is an exercise of
deadly efficiency. But are these boats
cleaning out the seas? Is there a better way? Now, Commercial Fishing
on "Modern Marvels." [music playing] In Alaska's Bering
Sea, monstrous ships stalk schools of
fish with precision and mechanical muscle. At 376 feet, the Alaska
Ocean is one of the largest commercial fishing
vessels on Earth. But in the North Pacific,
size takes a backseat to high technology. The ship's bridge contains the
latest in navigational gear, and a series of
monitors that display the cold, calculated
hunt for fish. DANIEL HANSON: Sometimes,
you can get 100 tons of fish inside of five or 10 minutes. Every piece of electronics
we've come to rely heavily on, and you hate to see
any of them go out. NARRATOR: It's called
fish-finding technology, and it's revolutionized
commercial fishing. The main advantages are if you
can get out and find the fish, you're-- you're saving
fuel, you're saving time, you're saving wear
and tear on your boat. [music playing] NARRATOR: It was World War II
that opened the door on finding fish. The sonar developed to
hunt enemy submarines was now making fishermen
more efficient, a key to survival in a
heavily regulated business. Thousands of miles from Alaskan
waters, the White Dove Too fishes for tuna out of the
historic port of Gloucester in Massachusetts. PETER MARSTON: The
regulations that are required for fishing
these days range everywhere from how many days you can go
fishing, how long you can stay out, how many fish
you can have on board of a particular species,
et cetera, et cetera. And with many of these
guys down to 50 days a year, you have to
be very efficient. Get on the fish, find the
fish, turn round and come home, and minimize your
days used at sea. [music playing] NARRATOR: Small
fishing boats also depend on the latest
in fish-finding gear. A fish finder, or
acoustic echo sounder, transmits a sound echo
or ping from a transducer straight down to
the ocean floor. PETER MARSTON: So
your pulse goes down, and if it hits a
fish, generally, what it's transmitting off is
the bladder, the air bladder inside the fish, which
will vary between species. Certain fish will look
stronger at certain different frequencies. And they'll use those
different frequencies to help differentiate
between species and the like. NARRATOR: A more
sophisticated omnisonar uses multiple transducers
that ping 360 degrees around the vessel. What that allows you to
do is see the targets-- depending on the frequency and
the range that you've selected, that allows you to see the
targets around the vessel, as opposed to the echo
sounder, which shows them under the vessel. NARRATOR: But pinpointing
a school of fish is only half the picture. The computerized chart
plotter has replaced paper nautical charts with a
system capable of using global positioning to map,
monitor, and record the ocean bottom in 3D. So now, by just glancing
over at the chart, you can see yourself
positioned on the bottom. So you can record
where you've been. You can put marks where
certain features are. Maybe there's a wreck there,
which tends to collect fish, or damaged nets, you know,
you may want to avoid. NARRATOR: Today, fishing
on a tight schedule with pinpoint
accuracy is mandatory for a small commercial
fisherman to stay in business. But this centuries-old tradition
may have endangered itself. Overfishing or the severe
depletion of certain fish species threatens
both man and nature. According to the UN's Food
and Agriculture Organization, about 60% of all commercially
important fish types are fully exploited,
overexploited, or depleted. But the fishing continues while
one reality doesn't change, commercial fishing remains
one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. Working on a constantly moving
platform, with the threat of rogue waves, and
sudden, devastating fires, fishermen face potential
disaster every day they set out to sea. The evolution of fishing
gear in North America begins with the fish weir. In 1913, during the excavation
of the Boston subway, workers unearthed a Native
American fish weir dated at nearly 4,000 years old. The weir resembled a fence with
an estimated 60,000 stakes used to trap fish during low tide. In the 16th century
BC, Egyptian fishermen were fishing from canoes with
barbed hooks made of bronze, and a variety of nets
to scoop and corral fish in large numbers. Commercial fishing began
on an international scale in 12th century Europe, when
the major maritime nations began venturing farther from
their heavily fished seas. And 1497, Italian
mariner John Cabot was contracted by
England's Henry VII to find the passage to Asia
that had eluded Christopher Columbus. Instead of a new trade
route, Cabot found a landmass he named Newfoundland. Along this foreign shore, he
discovered a treasure greater than gold, cod. MARK KURLANSKY: And
reports went back to Europe of incredible
stocks of cod. And the phrase that was used
was that you could scoop them up with a basket. And when Europeans heard
about this, it-- it created, you know, a kind of a
rush, like a gold rush, a cod rush to North America. [music playing] NARRATOR: Cod was one of
the most valuable fish in the world. It's flavorful white
flesh was highly prized. Salting and drying the flesh
could preserve it for months, yielding a food that was
80% concentrated protein. A good fishery was
like a good oilfield. Tremendous profits were being
made from North American cod. So it was ideal for explorers,
for provisions for armies, and in fact, it became
viewed by the British and by other countries as
a strategically important material, material of war. NARRATOR: Soon, the
French, British, Spanish, and Portuguese were building
long-range fishing fleets to begin an all-out commercial
assault on the North Atlantic cod. The cod ranged from the waters
of Newfoundland's Grand Banks, all the way to what is now
Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The salt codfish that soon was
being caught in great quantity and shipped back to Europe was
being traded with the Spanish for their gold, because salt
codfish was the only protein that you could preserve in
those latitudes down there. NARRATOR: The technology of
fishing in open seas changed little for centuries. Cod was generally caught by
hand-lining, a method by which one man used a line, a
weight, and a baited hook to catch and haul
in a single fish. Hand-lining from dories dates
back to the 16th century. A dory is a small
rowboat lowered over the side of the mothership
to return only when full of fish. Commercial dory fishing
was extremely dangerous. JOSEPH GARLAND: A
storm would come up, and the dory would get blown
downwind from the schooner, and if it was a little foggy,
it would be out of sight, and they would be adrift
300 or 400 miles from land with essentially no food,
you know, and that was it. MARK KURLANSKY: Often, the
catch would get so heavy that at a certain point, the
small boat would just sink. The mothership would try
to fish these guys out, but in the North Atlantic,
most of the year, you can't stay alive more than
a few minutes in the water. So it was incredibly dangerous. [music playing] NARRATOR: But the rich
cod stocks became vital to colonial America's economy. New Englanders made
immense profits trading salt cod to the world. It eventually brought financial
independence from the British, and therefore, helped establish
the United States of America. But the march of
technology finally shifted the worldwide demand
from salted fish to fresh fish. In the late 19th century,
the birth of steam power put engines aboard ships. Soon, steam, and eventually,
diesel-powered fishing vessels were plying the oceans
and scooping up fish in large trawl nets, effectively
speeding up the delivery of the catch to market. Then, in the 1920s,
a New York inventor named Clarence Birdseye
changed fishing forever when he unveiled a fast-freezing
technique to the world. MARK KURLANSKY: The
fast freezing process completely changed fishing,
because it meant that fish could be taken inland. In a country like the United
States with a huge interior, this meant a tremendous
increase in the market. NARRATOR: By 1948, the
world's commercial fish catch reached 19 million tons. It jumped to 60 million tons
in 1960, and 100 million tons by 1989. Hundreds of years of relentless
fishing in the North Atlantic resulted in catastrophe. In 1992, Canada
declared a moratorium on the Grand Banks Cod Fishery. One of the most productive
fisheries for over 500 years was now depleted. While overfishing in most
of the world's oceans is now a reality, a few
conservation-minded scientists are fighting back by using
behavior modification to keep juvenile fish
out of the net entirely. Paul Revere used the image
of a codfish, a symbol of prosperity, when he
designed currency plates for the Massachusetts
Bay Colony in 1776. The port of Gloucester,
Massachusetts is the oldest fishing
harbor in the United States. Its seafarers have fished the
far off waters of Georgia's bank and the Grand Banks
since the 17th century. Many never returned. Overlooking the harbor is the
Fisherman's Memorial, a tribute naming thousands
of local fishermen who have lost their lives at
sea, including the six men who perished in the infamous
Halloween gale in 1991. Their story was told in the
book and the 2000 feature film "The Perfect Storm." Linda Greenlaw was on the
outer edge of the perfect storm skipping the Hanna Bowden,
the Andrea Gail's sister ship. LINDA GREENLAW: We had 70 knots
of wind for a couple of days. It was bad. It was not life-threatening. But I was very frightened
listening to the boats west of me, and
these are guys who've been fishing all their lives. NARRATOR: The Andrea
Gail eventually succumbed to the 100-foot seas
and 90-knot winds. LINDA GREENLAW: Commercial
fishing is always on the top of the list of the
most dangerous professions, and a lot of that, of course,
is due to bad weather. CHRIS GLASS:
Commercial fishing is one of the toughest professions
on the face of the planet. These are individuals who
go hundreds of miles away. They work around the clock. They operate under
changing conditions, often, under horrendous conditions. And they really are,
I guess, the last of the true hunter-gatherers. [music playing] NARRATOR: Far from
shore, smaller boats are more susceptible
to nature's fury. In fishing ports up and
down the East Coast, many of these small boats
are called draggers. Draggers are bottom trawlers,
vessels that tow a large net along the ocean bottom
targeting ground fish, such as haddock, cod,
whiting, and flounder. Today's bottom trawler
pulls the funnel-shaped net at a 3-knot average speed. Guiding the net on either
end are otter doors. These heavy metal devices
force the net to the bottom and provide hydrodynamic spread
to keep the net's mouth open. Floats positioned
along the headline keep the net open vertically,
while a weighted ground rope and rubber rollers
keep the net in contact with the ocean bottom. As fish are overtaken, they're
guided into the collection area known as the cod end. While popular, bottom trawlers
are outnumbered by vessels called purse seiners. Seiners target high and
mid-water schooling fish, such as tuna,
salmon, and mackerel. In past centuries, seine nets
were deployed from beaches. Fishermen rowed the long
nets in a semicircle around a school of fish
while horses pulled the catch to shore. Today's open ocean purse seines
can reach a length of 1 mile. The net is motored around
a large school of fish. When the circle is complete,
the bottom purse line is pulled in like the
strings of a woman's purse, trapping the fish. The net is tightened, and the
fish are removed and brought aboard for cold storage. Purse seining and
bottom dragging are highly effective,
but at the same time, pose environmental threats. The primary threat
is known as bycatch. CHRIS GLASS: If you put
a net into the water, you're gonna catch
a number of things that you are not targeting,
and then those are thrown back into the-- the water at the
end of the-- the day end of the tow. And globally, we waste some
30% of everything that's caught that is not targeted. [music playing] NARRATOR: In Eastern Pacific
waters, by the 1960s, vast numbers of bycatch
dolphins were dying in purse seines meant for tuna. Because dolphins often
school above the fish, fishermen targeted the
mammals to catch tuna. Public outcry in
the United States eventually pressured Congress
into passing the 1990 Dolphin Safe Act. Today, the label indicates that
government observers certify the tuna has been caught
without harming dolphins. This is achieved by physically
lowering the float rope to allow the mammals
to escape the net. While the dolphin safe program
has been very successful, limiting other types of bycatch
is often more difficult. The National Marine
Fishery Service monitors commercial catch
quotas and bycatch limits. But scientists and fishermen
often don't see eye-to-eye. WILLIAM HOGARTH:
Does impact their way they make a living,
their profitability. There was a lot
of confrontation, I think, for a long time
between us and them, it was the us versus them. And they're on the water every
day, and they see things, and so we started what's called
cooperative research, working with the industry, and it's
become a more open process. NARRATOR: Cooperative
research pairs actual commercial
fishermen with scientists to develop new
conservation-minded fishing techniques. Most recently, this
partnership has resolved a highly publicized emotional
bycatch issue, the fate of the endangered sea turtle. For many years, shrimp trawlers
were responsible for the catch, and often, the subsequent deaths
of various sea turtle species. The National Marine
Fishery Service responded with a device
that is now required gear on shrimp trawl nets. It's called a turtle
excluder device. Basically, it's very simple. It's a grid. It's usually made out of
aluminum or a stainless steel that goes into the net. You put a hole below it. And so what it does is
the turtle hits that grid, and just it shoots out of
the net at either the top or the bottom, but the
grids are big enough so the fish go through. [music playing] NARRATOR: The Marine
Conservation Program at Massachusetts
Manomet Center is dedicated to reducing bycatch
in the problematic New England fisheries. CHRIS GLASS: So what we
have been trying to do over the years is to develop more
targeted, more selective fishing practices that allow
us to catch only the things that we want to catch,
that there's a market for, and release everything
else underwater unharmed. NARRATOR: The New England
Haddock Fishery has long been plagued by the unwanted
bycatch of the severely depleted Atlantic cod. The two fish frequently
swim in close contact. Using fixed underwater
video cameras, Manomet scientists studied the
behavior of cod and haddock as they entered the net. They found that haddock usually
react by swimming higher in the water. So if they enter the
net at a higher level, then we're able to put a
separator panel in the middle of the net, which will
direct all of the haddock into the caught end
where we retain the fish, and all the cod will
go out underneath. NARRATOR: A more
far-reaching problem is the bycatch of all
species of juvenile fish. Regulations forbid catching
small, young fish because of the potential damage
to the stock's population. A larger net mesh size has
helped curb some bycatch by allowing juveniles
to escape the net. But scientists are now
trying to improve results with behavior modification. CHRIS GLASS: We know that most
of the reactions of the fish are mediated through
the visual system. So the fish see what's around
them, they try to avoid it. We inserted into
the net something that we think would look
like the large, looming mouth of an approaching predator. So we simply put a black
tarp inside the net. It causes all of the fish that
encounter it to try and escape through the meshes,
and the small ones are capable of doing it
because they're small enough to get out of the meshes. NARRATOR: While
still in its infancy, fish behavior modification is
offering promising solutions to the bycatch problem. This fish psychotherapy
may someday go high-tech. This may involve things
like using laser lights to direct fish to a
much smaller caught end so that we're not
towing a whole net, or we might be able to use
holograms of some description to get fish to react to those. There-- there are lots of
things that we haven't even dreamt of yet. NARRATOR: While scientists are
learning how to better preserve wild fish species, others are
domesticating them in an effort to build the high-tech
fish farm of the future. Since the year 1716,
more than 5,000 fishermen from the Port of Gloucester
Massachusetts have died at sea. For thousands of years,
commercial fishing followed a
hunter-gatherer tradition, pursuing and harvesting
fish in the wild. But an explosion
in World population and the reality of overfishing
have promoted a new revision of the commercial fishermen. This fisherman doesn't
catch fish, he farms it. In 1970, US commercial
aquaculture was in its infancy, with most farms raising
trout, catfish, or carp in inland ponds
or holding tanks. Worldwide aquaculture
contributed just over 3% of all fish production. By the year 2003, it was
contributing more than 30%. In the 21st century,
the salmon is the King of the aquatic barnyard. The near-shore farming of
salmon is a booming business, with vast underwater cage
complexes located in calm water bays and estuaries in
places like Norway, Chile, and the coast of Maine. But large-scale
near-shore farming isn't the perfect solution. The environment could
be the casualty. LINWOOD PENDLETON:
Salmon raised in pens are raised in very
high densities, and just like with human beings,
when you have a lot of people together, a lot
of fish together, disease tends to run rampant,
and then these diseases get out to the wild
populations and can cause them significant
physiological stress. NARRATOR: A more typical issue
is dealing with huge amounts of fish waste. LINWOOD PENDLETON:
Salmon aquaculturalists need places that
have clean water with very little pollution. The irony of needing these
clean water places for salmon is that salmon then,
in turn, end up polluting the very
water that was chosen for its pristine nature. RICHARD LANGAN: The
impacts that were noticed were primarily impacts
on the seafloor, so fish feces, uneaten food
settling on the sea floor, changing what was a
natural environment into to an environment
that was degraded. NARRATOR: Salmon farmers are
sensitive to these problems, and attempts have been made to
reduce environmental impacts. But with 28% of the world's wild
fish stocks either overfished or nearing extinction,
aquaculture must overcome its drawbacks to
help feed an expanding world. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has vowed to increase
the annual value of US fish farming from $1 billion to $5
billion in the next 25 years. We have to look
at the combination, how does the wild and
agriculture fit together? So there's no doubt
that agriculture has a place in the future. Is it controversial? You bet. Right now, it is
extremely controversial. NARRATOR: One
group of scientists is going where no fish farmer
has dared to cultivate. Researchers with the University
of New Hampshire's Open Ocean Aquaculture Program
hope to neutralize some of the environmental impacts
by moving the farm miles out to sea. RICHARD LANGAN: I think
the offshore environment is actually a better environment
for a lot of the species that we're thinking
about culturing. We got a lot more
stable conditions in terms of the
temperature and salinity, got a lot of water movement
so that there's always clean water and well-oxygenated water. And then on-- on the
environmental side of things, you get a lot more dispersion
of any kind of wastes, of fish wastes and
any uneaten food. NARRATOR: After years of
experiments with flounder and haddock in smaller
cages, the team has built the first
commercial-scale farm containing over 35,000 of
the famous Atlantic cod. But the scientific challenges
of building an open ocean cage that could withstand the
biggest New England storms were daunting. When it came to
mooring systems, we took an approach of
developing modeling tools so that we could understand how
you would attach these things to the seafloor. What kind of anchors,
what kind of ropes, where the stresses would be. NARRATOR: Three 3,000
cubic meter cages were assembled by divers and
sunk to a depth of 100 feet. Nine 1-ton anchors
and heavy-duty chain hold the deep sea farm in place. Once the farm was
up and running, thousands of cod fingerlings
began their two-year lease in the blue water cages. But raising the brood
of wild cod in captivity was uncharted territory, so
video cameras were installed to monitor the nursery. The deep sea cameras
are controlled remotely to observe the societal
behaviors of the captive cod. The researchers implanted
small sonar transmitters inside a number of fish. RICHARD LANGAN: And then we
have hydrophones or listening devices inside the cage, and
we can then track these fish 24 hours a day, track their
motion throughout the cage, not only where they go, but
how fast they're swimming, and understand what
their behavior is and what their swimming
speed is relative to feeding, relative to day-night
differences, relative to interactions
with other fish. NARRATOR: Because the farm
is over 10 miles from shore, feeding the cod requires
the latest in high-tech room service. A loan automated feeder
buoy sustains the colony. By periodically stocking
the buoy with fish pellets, the researchers are able to
pump measured quantities of feed into the cages. Inside the buoy is the
remote-controlled brain that rings the dinner bell. RICHARD LANGAN: So we've
gotta have all the control mechanisms, all the
solenoid valves and so on that open and close all
these valves, turn the pumps on. So it's really a giant computer
that's out there operating all these mechanical systems. And what's nice about it is
we can do that from a computer here at the university. NARRATOR: The Open Ocean
Aquaculture Project represents a quantum leap in fish
farming, but it too has potential
environmental impacts. One of the greatest challenges
is oxygen depletion. Farm-raised fish excrete
ammonia, which depletes oxygen. RICHARD LANGAN: Well, right
now we can't measure it beyond the rim of the cage. We haven't seen any
oxygen depletion, but then again, we have
35,000 fish out there. The farm of the future will
have a half a million fish. Understanding what
happens on a small scale and then building
it out is going to help us predict what happens
in a real commercial operation. NARRATOR: But even as
fish farms get bigger, the world will continue to
depend on wild caught fish to feed its growing masses. And in one remote fishery,
there is a factory at sea that without restraint,
has the capability to strip the oceans of their fish. Growing seaweed in a fish
farm can improve water quality by reducing nitrogen
and phosphorus, both found in fish waste. Hundreds of miles from
shore, in frigid Alaskan seas that can produce wave
heights of 50 feet, the modern factory trawler gives
chase to a school of pollock. Some of these massive
catcher processors have the ability to
catch, process, and freeze more than 500 tons of
fish in a single day. BRETT JOHNSON: That's one of the
reasons that a vessel like this is so large, is that we take our
production facility to the fish rather than bringing the fish
to the production facility. NARRATOR: While salmon
was and is still a lucrative Alaskan
fish, for decades, few considered the boundless
offshore populations of walleye pollock, Pacific
cod, and whiting in the Gulf and Bering Sea. In the 1950s, factory trawler
fleets from the Soviet Union, Japan, and other countries began
fishing these remote waters. As time went on, and other
people here in the Northwest understood that those fisheries
were worth a lot of money, and that we could bring a lot
more of those dollars home to the beach, home to America
we extended our jurisdiction out to the 200 mile. It wasn't just a
fisheries decision, but it was a good
decision for fishermen. NARRATOR: Until
1976, most nations observed a 12-mile
territorial boundary at sea. Then Congress passed
the Magnuson Act, and the US established a
200-mile exclusive economic zone. So did many other nations. The US proceeded to
evict the foreign fleets. At first, American fishermen
worked in joint ventures with foreign factory vessels,
until the early 1980s, when the US launched its
own factory trawler fleet. When those vessels
began coming around, we began essentially taking over
the entire fishery and moving the for-- the foreign fleets off
the 200-mile zone and putting up a whole new kind of fishing
in Alaska that we hadn't seen there before. NARRATOR: Based in
Seattle's Puget Sound, today's fleet of
catcher processors traveled to Alaskan waters
for two fishing seasons, in the winter and late summer. While there are only 15 active
vessels in the entire fleet, their catch capacity
is unrivaled. In 2002, the factory trawlers
and smaller catcher vessels landed more than 1.5 million
tons of Pollock, some 40% of the entire commercial fish
catch in the United States. At the time that these big
vessels were being developed, there were-- there were great technological
advances going on in hydraulics, high-pressure
hydraulics, gear, big trawl winches, and
certainly, electronics, also, in the material that the
nets were made out of, Spectra fiber nets, very
similar to Kevlar and things that you would make
bullet proof vests out of. NARRATOR: With a price
tag approaching $100,000, some of these
mid-quarter monstrosities have a mouth nearly as wide
as a football field is long. The Alaska Fishery Science
Center makes and repairs a variety of trawl nets. DAVID KING: This is a 4-seam
bottom trawl using the ground fish fisheries in Alaska. This net is towed by a boat
of about 700 horsepower. Typical factory
trawler in Alaska is closer to 2,500
to 3,500 horsepower. This is a lot smaller than
you'll see on most boat, but it's of the same shape. Just a smaller version of it. NARRATOR: Protecting many
trawl nets from damage and maximizing
their spread radius underwater is the duty of
wireless acoustic sensors mounted on or near the otter
doors that pull the net. MIKE HILLERS: What
these sensors do is-- is send back information about
the geometry of the trawl. These are door spread sensors. One of them is placed
on either door, and you can get the
distance between it, and you can see that your
trawl is flying stable. And this increases the
efficiency of the fishing operation drastically. [sensor beeping] DANIEL HANSON: This
pollock fishery, fortunately, is the cleanest
fishery in the world. And we catch almost
100% pollock, so it's very important for
us too to keep it clean. NARRATOR: Fishermen
often refer to the caught of the net as the money bag. Knowing when the giant
bag is full under water is critical to avoid
smashing the fish with an oversized load. These are catch load
sensors right here. And the way that these work are
as the bag fills up, naturally gets wider this way, these
lines start taking some strain, and you'll see this oftentimes
is called a sausage. As it happens, and
these open up sideways, it pulls and it trips this and
sends an acoustic message back to the skipper and says
that at this point, there's fish up to
this point in the bag. And when this
happens, the skipper knows that I have 100-ton bag,
I've got 100 tons of fish, and it's time to haul
back before I cause damage to the net. NARRATOR: Because the
processing factory below deck runs 24 hours a day,
fish must be caught at a rate that matches
the factory's ability to process and freeze it. BRETT JOHNSON: Automation
for us is of the essence. It's extremely important,
because we don't have a lot of room on board for people. We're limited by
the amount of people we can put on a
vessel this size. So anything we can
automate, we do. The vessels that we operate
run somewhere between 15 and 20 tons of fish an hour, and on a
pace that produces roughly 100 tons of finished goods a day. NARRATOR: After sizing
and weighing the catch, the removal of skin
and bones begins. BRETT JOHNSON: We can
process 120 fish a minute through a fillet
machine that'll produce a boneless, skinless
filet, and that's done without any interaction
with the fish other than the driver placing
it into the machine. So sizing of the fish, and
then a proper adjustment of the filet machine is
a critical thing for us. NARRATOR: The human eye
checks the machine's work as the filets cross
the candling table. Here, workers check for any
skin or bones that remain. From this point, the fish will
become one of two products for the end consumer. The majority are pressed
into formed fish filets that will end up as fast food
sandwiches or fish sticks. The other product
is called surimi. BRETT JOHNSON:
Surimi was originally created as a form of storage
for fish without refrigeration. The process of creating
surimi is a process that removes the soluble protein
and oils from the fish protein. NARRATOR: This
fish paste is later used to make imitation crab
meat and many other manufactured foods in the Japanese market. When onboard
processing is complete, the fish products are quickly
frozen and then delivered to the ship's massive
cold storage hold. When the hold is full, the
fishing ends, and the vessel heads to port for unloading. Throughout the 1990s, the
combined yearly harvest quota for pollock turned
the Bering Sea into a high-stakes commercial
fishing tournament. JOHN VAN AMERONGEN: The
fishery was open for everybody to fish this fast and
as hard as you could until the quota was caught. There was a real pressure,
not only from fishermen, but from the environmental
community too in what they call the race for fish. NARRATOR: But by the
end of the 20th century, the Bering Sea Pollock Fishery
underwent a drastic change. Today, the competitors
are now teammates, as a co-operative is now in
place to eliminate overfishing. But when more than a
million tons of pollock are being harvested
in a single year, it's up to a new generation
of fishery scientists to make sure this
fish will never share the fate of the Atlantic cod. In 1999, scientists
tracked a school of pollock that covered more than
30,000 square nautical miles and contained more
than 11 billion fish. At Seaview Lobster
Company in Kittery, Maine, a harvest of
prehistoric-looking bugs is sorted, weighed, and
prepared for overnight shipment to points around the world. Commercial lobster King
is a $300 million a year business, one of America's
highest value fisheries. But the lust for lobster
has a very short history. PETER FLANIGAN: Well,
lobsters were always regarded as a-- as a trash species. Years ago, they used to wash
up in wind rows on the beach, and people would harvest and
carry them home and spread them on the fields as fertilizer. They were always fed to
the slaves and the servants and were considered a very
low-level dietary item. As time progressed,
people seemed to develop a taste for them. They became more
and more popular. NARRATOR: By the late 1800s,
their value skyrocketed, and the great
lobster hunt began. WIN WATSON: And then, as
the fishing picked up, the numbers declined
fairly rapidly. But the unusual thing,
the surprising thing is despite all the
fishing pressure, the lobster populations have
not declined much in the last 50 years, I'd say. NARRATOR: At the University
of New Hampshire, zoologists are trying to
determine how lobsters are resisting fishing pressure in
an attempt to better forecast their future. One part of the research
uses video cameras placed inside the traps. The static lobster trap
has changed very little. It still depends on the
lobsters to capture themselves. We found out that although
many lobsters approach traps, many lobsters go into
traps, we actually end up catching very
few of those lobsters. NARRATOR: The time lapse cameras
revealed that the lobster fishery thrives on inefficiency. WIN WATSON: The
most striking thing is that lobsters are climbing
all over these traps. It's like a little anthill. Once a lobster
gets into the trap, it prevents others from
entering while it's feeding. They can escape fairly readily. 90% of them get out. We call it the
restaurant theory, that they're just
stopping by, they're having something to eat. They occasionally get caught
and pulled up to the surface, but many, many of them get away. This has implications of why
the fishery is so robust. We're not removing
as many lobsters as we might be able to remove
if we had very efficient traps. NARRATOR: By mounting sonar
transmitters on lobsters, the scientists are able to
remotely monitor movement and gain valuable information
on behavior dynamics. In the inefficient New
England lobster fishery, catch levels
continue to be high. But inefficiency plays no
part in the $2 billion a year Alaska pollock fishery. Here, absolute efficiency
is the key to conservation. The National Marine
Fishery Service has revolutionized the
science of population dynamics and forged a rare partnership
with the commercial fishing fleet. We conduct annual
stock assessments where we estimate the
productivity of the resource, and from that, make
recommendations to the North Pacific Council on-- on harvest levels
for the coming year. NARRATOR: Scientists estimated
the pollock population at 12.3 million tons in 2004. Based on legal catch
limits, fishermen harvested 1.64 million
tons, or about 13% of the total population. Counting fish and arriving
at the all-important harvest maximum is a major
undertaking that requires human observers,
acoustic science, and a little fishing. The net shed at the Alaska
Fishery Science Center in Seattle builds and
repairs massive trawl nets for scientists turned fishermen. DAVID KING: We use these nets
for stock assessment purposes. We go out, we catch fish. We make the same
tows year after year, and then we get a feel for
the stocks are going up, they're going down. We take samples, we
look at the biology. We take link frequencies,
we take sex of the fish, and then you get a feel for
what the aggregate of fish are and the health of
the stock in that area. NARRATOR: One highly
specialized fishing vessel is the Miller Freeman, a
floating research laboratory capable of finding and
counting fish in a five million square kilometer area
of the Bering Sea. We run a uniformly spaced,
parallel transit pattern. It's basically like going
out and mowing the yard, but collecting acoustic data
and information from net catches along those parallel transits. And what we do is we as a
scientific echo sounder, as well as trawls, large
nets, either mid-water nets or bottom nets, to sample
the acoustic targets that we encounter. NARRATOR: The researchers
chase large schools of pollock to sample population density
and the ratio of juveniles to adults. The final part of the equation
is the NOAA observer program. As in most US fisheries,
trained observers are placed aboard many
commercial vessels to get a firsthand view
of the intended catch, and the unintended bycatch. BILL KARP: Well, their
principal responsibility is to collect information on
catch quantity and composition, to document that, and
then to send it forward. There are bycatch issues
that really affect fishing opportunities,
and in some cases, fisheries can be closed or
curtailed because of bycatch of salmon or halibut. NARRATOR: Observers transmit
a near real-time report on catch composition
and any bycatch issues. This information is reviewed
by commercial fleet managers in Seattle who can
then immediately redirect the fishing to an area
without the bycatch problems. This relationship between
fishermen and scientists is critical to the health of
America's largest fishery, but the Alaskan
waters are unique. Today, nine of the
world's 17 major fisheries are considered
overfished or threatened. Rather than saving
them, better technology may be leading to their demise. I think since World War II,
that technology has increase so much, sonar, depth
finders, the greater speed, just so many things have
made fishing more effective. Efficiency is
devastating to a fishery. What efficiency means
is that you produce more with fewer people. Ideally, a fishery should
be doing just the opposite. They should be
catching less fish and employing more fishermen. NARRATOR: But the Bering Sea may
predict a different future, one that combines efficiency
and science to harvest, yet safeguard the
ocean's bounty. JOHN VAN AMERONGEN:
For every 15 pollock, we catch there's still 85 of
them swimming in the Bering Sea, even though we catch
over 1.3 million metric tons. So when you have a golden
goose like the North Pacific, it really is not in the best
interests of the industry to kill the thing off. NARRATOR: In some US
fisheries, conservation is a major priority. Aquaculture and
better fishery science will hopefully take
pressure off wild stocks. But without proper management,
the future for all fisheries may be an empty net. Meanwhile, a
determined group of men keep fishing, struggling to
maintain a proud tradition in nature's threatening
and threatened seas. [music playing]
