The untold story of Alaska pollock

This is a book cover redesign for a book called “billion dollar fish“. I chose to illustrate this particular book because it’s current Amazon sales rank #1,004,963. I think it’s an important story and one that needs to be told.

Here’s an extract from a paper entitled: “An empty donut hole: the great collapse of a North American fishery”

In 2007, the biomass estimate was at its nadir of 309 thousand tons, a decline of 98% from the maximum. In fact, in that year, during a test fishery conducted under the auspices of the Bering Treaty, a pair of Korean trawlers spent 2 weeks trawling for pollock in the Aleutian Basin, and caught just two pollock. Most fish in the catches were smooth lumpsuckers (Aptocyclus ventricosus) (CBS Treaty 2007). Now, after 20 years, the population still has not recovered. Bycatch of pollock in Japanese survey longline catches in the Aleutian Basin tend to support the scenario depicted above; there was a substantial but lower background level of abundance in the 1970s, which increased in the 1980s, collapsed in the 1990s, and now hovers around zero (CBS 2010). [source]

ABSTRACT. Walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma) is North America’s most abundant and lucrative natural fishery, and
is the world’s largest fishery for human food. The little-known demise of the “Donut Hole” stock of pollock in the Aleutian
Basin of the central Bering Sea during the 1980s is the most spectacular fishery collapse in North American history, dwarfing
the famous crashes of the northern cod and Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax). This collapse has received scant recognition and
became evident only in 1993 when fishing was banned by an international moratorium; nearly 20 years later it has not recovered.
The history of fishing in the North Pacific Ocean after World War II offers some insights into how the Donut Hole pollock
fishery developed, and the societal and economic pressures behind it that so influenced the stock’s fate. Overfishing was, without
a doubt, the greatest contributor to the collapse of the Aleutian Basin pollock fishery, but a lack of knowledge about population
biocomplexity added to the confusion of how to best manage the harvest. Unfortunately, the big scientific questions regarding
the relationship of Donut Hole fish to other stocks are still unanswered.

It takes a lot of time to make a drawing like that, so that’s it from me today!
Leslie