In a one-room genetics lab in Dutch Harbor, Abby Duffy was getting ready to load extracted fish DNA into what’s called a chip. It’s a clear, rectangular plate with rows of small wells separated by a silicone center.
“I like to make sure I’ve eaten recently so my hands are the least shaky they’re going to be,” she said. “Make sure my brain’s doing what it should be doing.”
Duffy is the lab manager at the Bristol Bay Science and Research Institute’s Dutch Harbor location. The space is brightly lit, with tables and shelves lining the walls. Small incubators, a robotic pipetting machine, and a centrifuge sit on top of the tables.
Every week from June to October — the Bering Sea pollock B season — Duffy and her team collect genetic information from chum salmon that get scooped up in pollock nets as bycatch. They want to know how many of those fish are from Western Alaska.
“There are communities and people who really rely on those stocks for economics, for subsistence food, for cultural health,” Duffy said.
Falling chum salmon numbers have devastated communities in Western Alaska that rely on them for subsistence. Researchers have pointed to climate change as a major reason for the declines, but the amount of chums caught by Bering Sea pollock trawlers has also come under scrutiny – with calls to curb bycatch or ban it altogether. The issue has even become an election season flashpoint in Alaska.
The Bristol Bay Science and Research Institute’s Western Alaska Chum Bycatch Assessment Program, started two years ago, is the only lab in the state using in-season genetics testing to capture chum bycatch numbers in the pollock fishery.
The process starts with pieces of fins collected from a portion of the bycatch that arrives at five different canneries in the region.
“Once we have those fin clippings,” Duffy said, “We dry them so that they can be stored at room temperature indefinitely. And starting on Sunday, we begin our work for the week.”
Each week, the lab works with a new batch of bycatch samples from seafood processors in Dutch Harbor and Akutan. Last year, they gathered over 9,000 samples and genetically analyzed almost three-quarters of them.
The raw genetic data goes to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab, where it’s analyzed to assess the stock composition, or how many total chums for that week come from six different locations around the Pacific Rim. The lab then publishes its results online in a public weekly stock composition report.
Annually, less than 20% of the pollock fishery's chum bycatch comes from Western Alaska fish – most comes from Asia, the Gulf of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.
Duffy said the goal is to provide a science-based tool that can be used for everyone’s benefit.
“What we’re really trying to do is to help Alaska be one of the best managed fisheries in the world,” she said. “We’re really hoping that this kind of work can be the new frontier of fisheries management,” she said.
The lab’s data has already been put to use. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council manages fisheries in federal waters off Alaska’s coast. Earlier this year, it used the information to set a Western Alaska chum bycatch limit for the Bering Sea pollock fishery.
