Video Clips

Quoted moments from Alaska public meetings, hearings, and press conferences.

Clips from North Pacific Fishery Management CouncilClear

Austin Esterbrooks

“the first species distribution modeling of Chinook salmon, that's been something that Sabrina Garcia has been working on for some time, and the idea is to use all the tagging information that we have and try to predict distributions of Chinook salmon based on environmental drivers as well as historical bycatch records, as well as any kind of tagging data that informs Chinook salmon distributions and trying to get, you know, an understanding of when and where and why Chinook go where they go. And that would then translate into potential data products that the fleet could look at to inform when and where they're going to choose the fish and preemptively avoid Chinook salmon, as opposed to the way the rolling hotspot program works, which is to avoid salmon after you know where they're at.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

1:12

Austin Esterbrooks

“we're tracking a broader, longer-term, what is the general abundance of Chinook on the grounds over a 3-week period? What is the larger temporal average rate that we're seeing? And then we look discrete spatial areas, so those ADF&G stat areas, and we see where in the Bering Sea we're seeing rates that are higher relative to that longer, broader-term Chinook abundance. We identify those areas that stand out above that broader-term bycatch rate, and then we then close those areas, and those areas are prohibited from fishing by any vessel that is not performing better than 25% or 25% better than that baseline average bycatch rate.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:32

Austin Esterbrooks

“that project should be scheduled to wrap up, uh, soon. I know it was a 3-year project, uh, off the top of my head. I don't know, they might have had a 1-year extension on that too, um, but she should be wrapping up relatively in the— I mean, in the next year or two.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:38

Austin Esterbrooks

“chum salmon bycatch, again relative to the 2024, um, it was a higher year for chum salmon. And this was again reduced sea ice, typically, uh, causes the pollock and chum distributions in the B season to overlap more extensively because there's less feed on the shelf relative to along the shelf break. And the salmon are primarily basin dwellers, and so in the warmer years, there is more overlap with the fishery and the chum distributions.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:40

Austin Esterbrooks

“we funded more with respect to salmon research than any other category of marine research in the last 20, 25 years.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:18

Austin Esterbrooks

“there were no violations of any of the IPA bycatch avoidance rules or fishing prohibitions in 2025.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:46

Austin Esterbrooks

“obviously 2018-19 were some of the lower, lower sea ice years on record in the Bering Sea. So, um, 2018, you don't see the effect yet, but 2019 and 2020, there was definitely sort of a lagged effect there in terms of the bycatch.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:07

Austin Esterbrooks

“In terms of the historical Chinook salmon bycatch, 2025 wasn't as good as 2024.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:24

Austin Esterbrooks

“Giving you a brief look at the halibut performance of the fleet last year relative to the longer-term trends, again, it was the, the third best year and I attribute this mostly to, again, the health of the pollock stock and reduced time fishing generally equates to lower bycatch.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:25

Austin Esterbrooks

“this is typically due to temperature regimes in the Bering Sea. We typically see a lot more Chinook move up onto the shelf and overlap with the pollock distributions when temperatures are warmer. And this held true in 2025, particularly in the A season. There were a lot more Chinook up on the shelf overlapping with the fishery.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:05

Austin Esterbrooks

“we had 9 chum bycatch avoidance areas that were identified in 2025 across the B season.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:35

Austin Esterbrooks

“under a low abundance year, which we were under in 2025 and have been for a series of years, the 1.8 or 0.018 number there is what the fleet is striving to achieve. So essentially, if you catch more than 2 Chinook salmon in any given tow over the course of the season, that's too many. And so that, that's the goal at which our fleet is trying to operate across the entire season.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:58

Austin Esterbrooks

“prior to the IPA years, you can see the extremely broad distribution of individual vessel level bycatch performance on the left-hand side. And then as you move into the post-Amendment 91, 2011, and to the present, the fleet level distribution has become incredibly homogenized, and that continues to hold true in 2025 and 2026.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:41

Austin Esterbrooks

“we had 13 different Chinook bycatch avoidance areas that were identified across the 2025 fishing year.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:56

Austin Esterbrooks

“in 2025, for example, we had a discard— or sorry, a groundfish bycatch ratio of less than 1%. And so this gives you sort of a benchmark of how the fleet performed historically. That longer-term groundfish discard ratio was— is 1.7%. So 2025 was relative to the historical period cleaner on average.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

0:40

Austin Esterbrooks

“we also track longer-term trends of the retention ratio of the, the groundfish that we catch. And so this is showing you what we keep and use as a saleable product relative to what we catch, and this of the FMP, so the Fisheries Management Plan managed species. And again, it's 99.8%, and this is pretty typical for our fleet over the long-term average. I would say we, we over the long term retain greater than 99.5% of everything that we catch.”

NPFMC 279 Day 2 - June 5, 2026 · Jun 5, 2026

1:20

Heather Mann

“Section 303, and I do have an attachment if you can put it up, um, does say that when establishing a limited entry, a limited access privilege program, a council shall develop a methodology methodology and the means to identify and assess management, data collection, analysis, and enforcement costs directly related to the program. Yet during the development of Amendment 122, I do not recall the council ever developing or debating a methodology for identifying recoverable costs, allocating those costs among participants, or determining how OLE costs would be attributed to the the program.”

NPFMC 279 Day 3 - June 6, 2026 · Jun 6, 2026

0:43

Anita Kroska

“Option 2 was chosen, that was put forward by the Kodiak Crab Alliance Cooperative, KCAC Group, in the April 2025 council meeting during their testimony as an option for consideration. And their— I think their intention was to draw a boundary option centered around some Tanner crab abundance densities using heat maps provided by Alaska Department of Fish and Game them during that meeting.”

NPFMC 279 Day 3 - June 6, 2026 · Jun 6, 2026

1:11

Heather Mann

“The AP notes that Sections 303 and 304 of MSA authorize recovery only of actual costs, and you've heard a lot about that. The AP further recognizes NOAA's longstanding interpretation that recoverable costs should be limited to incremental costs, the old but-for. The but-for situation and standard is important because it goes directly to congressional intent. Cost recovery was never intended to be a mechanism for allocating general agency overhead or broad fisheries enforcement activities, like transferring through a rookery, for example, to a relatively small group of participants simply because they operate in a catch share”

NPFMC 279 Day 3 - June 6, 2026 · Jun 6, 2026

0:52

Anita Kroska

“this stock since the year 2000 is that they undergo a really cyclical recruitment cycle where a lot of crab move through the system every few years, every 3 to 5 or 6 years.”

NPFMC 279 Day 3 - June 6, 2026 · Jun 6, 2026

0:56

Anita Kroska

“The council is considering management actions that can serve and protect Tanner crab while minimizing negative impacts on the Central Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries, including establishing a new groundfish fishing area closure on the east side of Kodiak Island in areas known to have high densities and abundance of Tanner crab, and considering a process to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing Gulf of Alaska Tanner crab protection areas around Kodiak Island and determine whether modifications are needed.”

NPFMC 279 Day 3 - June 6, 2026 · Jun 6, 2026