Bering Sea survey could provide insight on cod finds

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — U.S. scientists plan to survey the Bering Sea this summer and hope to shed light on why fish not normally seen in its northern stretches have been found there.

Cod is caught in large numbers by commercial boats in the Bering Sea but typically hundreds of miles south of Nome.

Yet, last fall, fisherman Adem Boeckmann, who lives outside Nome, said he found cod in some of his crab pots. He told Alaska's Energy Desk he had never seen anything like that.

Lyle Britt, a federal fisheries scientist, said there aren't clear answers.

"Is this part of an environmental shift, where with the warming, the northern Bering Sea is going to become a top-down system?" he said. "Or, is this more like an ephemeral trend that just happened because we had an unusually warm year, and things will reset? We don't really know."

The surveys are being done by the Seattle-based Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which is an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They will include the northern part of the Bering Sea, full surveys of which have been done less frequently than those in the eastern Bering Sea, a region that also will be included in this summer's work.

The two most recent surveys of the northern Bering Sea occurred in 2010 and 2017, the latter of which was a warmer year with lower sea ice.

The year's surveys could shed light on whether 2017's results, which showed large amounts of pollock and cod in the northern Bering Sea compared to 2010, reflected an isolated event or the start of a long-term trend.

The eastern Bering Sea cod and pollock fisheries are worth an estimated $2 billion. Fishermen have seen a gradual shift northward in their cod fishing patterns, said Chad See, executive director of the Freezer Longline Coalition, an industry...