The fish are moving, and so is an entire industry.
Aboard the Stanley K and the Oracle, two 58-foot vessels, Buck Laukitis and his crews chase halibut across the Bering Sea worth $5 a pound at the docks. As sea temperatures rise and Arctic ice retreats, the fish appear to be avoiding warming waters, migrating northward where they cost more to reach, federal fisheries biologists say.
Twice this past fall, the Oracle sailed 800 miles north from the seaport of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, before finding the halibut that a decade ago lived several hundred miles closer to home. Each voyage took twice as long and yielded half as many fish.
“It keeps me up at night,” he says. “I woke up at three in the morning. I couldn’t sleep thinking about where the fish are going.”
“I woke up at three in the morning,” says an Alaska fisherman dealing with warming seas. “I couldn’t sleep thinking about where the fish are going.” https://t.co/SLAIEJwnmu
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 22, 2018