A Missed Opportunity: NPFMC Delays Drafting a Clear Pelagic Trawl Definition

Posted on June 26, 2025

At its June meeting in Newport, Oregon (June 2–10), the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) once again sidestepped the critical opportunity to update an honest and enforceable definition for pelagic trawl gear. Their preferred motion involves making modest tweaks, removing outdated language, allowing for flotation, and permitting modern excluders, which are positive steps toward modernization, enabling innovation. But the action leaves gaping holes. Most notably, it still permits midwater trawl nets to contact the seafloor, despite evidence and stakeholder concern that this is not “pelagic,” but effectively bottom trawling. 

Currently, pelagic trawl is the only federally managed gear type that operates with no regulated seafloor contact, yet is not designated as bottom contact or mobile bottom contact. This regulatory blind spot undermines the integrity of habitat protections and creates inconsistency across gear classifications. There is still no clear understanding of whether the Council intends for pelagic trawl gear to have any limitations in terms of seafloor interactions.

Amidst all the technical updates, true enforcement boundaries were not drawn. The motion strips explicit prohibitions on metal in codends, allows flotation aft of mesh, and yet leaves the door open for gear that unknowingly, or willfully, negatively interacts with juvenile crab, halibut, or cod habitat.

This isn’t a semantic debate. In the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea, data indicates that pelagic trawl gear contacts the seafloor 40-100% of the time, including areas that are supposed to be protected as Essential Fish Habitat. Clearing away the misleading “midwater” language is about transparency, habitat protection, and maintaining public trust.

Despite strong public and tribal testimony for action, as well as a failed Advisory Panel motion, the Council deferred the real work to 2026, relegating it to a future review tied to gear innovation and modeling. That’s too late for vulnerable juvenile species and critical crab nurseries still at risk today.

The Council’s choice feels less like prudent deliberation and more like surrender to industry influence. When straightforward solutions, like defining pelagic gear as having no or explicitly limited bottom contact, are brushed aside, what’s left is a regulatory mirage: modernized in appearance, but hollow in enforcement.

This disappointment isn’t just bureaucratic. It’s felt by Alaska’s coastal communities, fishermen, and tribes, who testified passionately to protect their waters, habitats, and heritage.

We needed strong leadership. Instead, the topic has been kicked down the road, to be dealt with another day.