April 2015
| Business World
111
compared to other target fish behaviour –
excludes them from the catch mechanically.
That’s reduced our halibut bycatch by quite
a bit.”
The other main challenge AKSC is working
on is reducing halibut mortality during the
sampling process. According to Anderson,
roughly 80 per cent of halibut die during
that stage.
“We’re trying to figure out a way to provide
accurate accounting of halibut bycatch and
get those halibut in the water sooner by sort-
ing them on deck,” he explained. “It’s impor-
tant to have protocols in place to get an accu-
rate catch counting, and we’re working with
an agency in figuring out how to do that and
get halibut back in the water.”
“There’s a lot of political pressure on all
groups to reduce halibut bycatch,” he contin-
ued. “This is an international issue because
Canada has a portion of the halibut resource
and the USA has a portion of the halibut
resource, and it becomes fairly politicized
rather quickly.”
The challenge, Anderson said, is that fisher-
men have made a lot of improvements to re-
duce halibut bycatch already. Many of them
feel like further incremental improvements
will be small, with the exception of deck
sorting – but even that comes with its own
specific challenges.
