Preserving Arctic Fisheries Before Harvesting Them :: DivePhotoGuide.com

In the wake of dramatically dwindling populations of salmon and other fish, U.S. officials are grappling with ways to cut their losses—and stave off future damage. Overfishing and environmental damage have decimated ocean inhabitants—and climate change threatens to hurt them even more. Just this month, the Pacific Fishery Management Council in Portland, Ore., closed the coasts of California and Oregon to salmon fishing after observing an alarming drop in the species population there, which plummeted in just one river—the Sacramento— from hundreds of thousands in the 1990s to just about 58,000 this past fall.

"Historically, in many places in the world, what humankind has done is rushed into the ocean and harvested, trawled and discarded ocean fish until a fishery collapsed," says Jim Ayers, vice president, Pacific, of the conservation group Oceana. "That is managing based on collapse," or only protecting a fishery after it has dwindled or disappeared, like the cod fishery off the Atlantic coast of Canada.

Meanwhile, there is a new fishery of sorts opening in the Arctic, thanks to sea ice receding from the north coast of Alaska that is making way for new fish hangouts. Salmon, among other fish, are beginning to show up north of the Bering Strait as they migrate in search of cooler waters that are disappearing in the more southern parts of the ocean. The catch: commercial fishing boats will follow, unless all fishing north of the Bering Strait is banned as proposed by scientists, environmentalists and even the fishing industry itself.