Federal managers weigh permit letting a Bering Sea trawler donate halibut it now must discard

The National Marine Fisheries Service is considering a permit that would let one Bering Sea trawl catcher/processor, a vessel that catches and processes fish at sea, donate halibut to food banks instead of throwing it overboard. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council will take up the application at its Oct. 5–13 meeting at the Egan Center in Anchorage, and comments to the agency are due Oct. 16.

Hannah Lindoff of SeaShare and Glenn Merrill of Glacier Fish Co. applied Aug. 21 for an exempted fishing permit, a federal waiver that allows otherwise prohibited fishing for limited experiments. It would let one catcher/processor in the Bering Sea yellowfin sole fishery keep up to 5,000 pounds of headed-and-gutted halibut, about 3 metric tons of whole fish, and donate it through the Prohibited Species Donation program from May 1, 2027, through Dec. 31, 2028.

Trawlers aren't allowed to keep halibut they catch while fishing for other species. Halibut are sorted on deck and discarded, and any that reach the factory are sampled by an observer and then discarded too. The donation program accepts trawl-caught halibut only from catcher vessels delivering to shoreside and floating processors, which leaves catcher/processors out. The permit would waive two rules to change that.

It would not change halibut bycatch limits, deck sorting, catch monitoring or catch accounting, according to the notice. The Alaska Fisheries Science Center found the experiment's design valid, and NMFS's draft finding is that its limited size and duration would have no significant environmental effects.

SeaShare, a nonprofit, has been the program's only distributor since 1996 and has moved more than 6 million pounds of salmon and halibut bycatch to food banks through Feeding America, according to NOAA Fisheries. The program donated 11,326 pounds of halibut in 2024, according to SeaShare's annual report to the council in June. In that report, Lindoff wrote that "prevention is the most important step in reducing food waste due to bycatch," with donation the next step when bycatch happens.

Comments can be submitted through Regulations.gov under docket NOAA-NMFS-2026-2641, by mail to the agency's Juneau office or in testimony before the council.