The North Pacific Fishery Management Council took action at its October meeting in Anchorage after seeing graphic photographs presented by a Kodiak fisherman of tanner crab piled high on the deck of a trawl vessel fishing for groundfish.

The photos, presented to the council by Kodiak fisherman Alexus Kwachka, were taken by crew on an undisclosed trawl vessel operating off the waters of Kodiak Island last summer.

"These pictures are truly worth a thousand words," said Kwachka. "They demonstrate a problem more clearly than the statistical analysis that has so far masked a significant problem. Our goal is to protect the crab that support our local small boat fishery."

The federal council, in turn, voted to evaluate a range of potential management measures that include modifying groundfish gear to avoid harvests of tanner crab, increased observer coverage, and the closure of some areas to trawlers.

Tanner crab stocks in the Kodiak area, which produced huge harvests in the 1970s, are still in the rebuilding process.

Wayne Donaldson, the state's regional management biologist for shellfish at Kodiak, said at the peak of the fishery in the late 1970s, crab vessels would harvest as much 30 million pounds of tanner crab in some years.

For the last eight years, the harvest has been 500,000 to 2 million pounds a year, and worth $1 million to $3 million, Donaldson said.

Kodiak's small boat fleet has been concerned over a lack of catch monitoring in the Gulf of Alaska, where there has been a significant incidental harvest of tanner crab. Although vessels over 125 feet in length must have full time observers on board, vessels from 60 feet to 124 feet in length fishing around Kodiak Island are required to carry certified observers only 30 percent of the time.

The Alaska Marine Conservation Council, speaking on behalf of the small boat fleet, said this lack of information may have masked a problem in the trawl fishery, which drags gear on the seafloor catching most of the crab encountered. There is also a similar lack of data describing bycatch of crab by vessels fishing for cod with pots.

In response, council members voted unanimously to direct the staff to refine areas where they are considering closure to learn how many vessels now have observer coverage, how much tanner crab is being caught incidentally to the groundfish harvest, and the level of potential interaction between the crab harvesters and groundfish fleet.

The council also voted to move forward with its analysis on the incidental catch of Chinook salmon in the groundfish fisheries in the Gulf of Alaska.

"We just don't have enough data," said Herman Savikko, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Information sought includes genetic information that would be gathered from fish sampled to determine their river of origin.

Theresa Peterson, the Kodiak outreach coordinator for the Alaska Marine Conservation Council and herself a commercial harvester, said the most significant step the council could take would be to identify areas of high concentration of tanner crab and close them to groundfish harvesters.

"It was a fair motion," said Julie Bonney of the Alaska Groundfish Forum in Kodiak. "Getting better information is a good thing. It's all about getting better data."

But Bonney predicted it would be another year before the council takes any final action regarding the tanner crab bycatch.

Bycatch issues regarding Gulf of Alaska crab and salmon were originally included in the environmental impact statement for the proposed privatizing of Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries. When gulf rationalization was put on the back burner in 2006, so were efforts to study tanner crab bycatch in the Gulf of Alaska.

Peterson emphasized in her testimony that there are currently no conservation measures designed for tanner crab in the Gulf.

Since 2004, AMCC has received multiple letters, each signed by at least 100 Kodiak Island fishermen, requesting management measures to protect tanner crab, she said.

"Fishermen are concerned about increasing trawl effort in areas important for tanner crab," Peterson said. "We appreciate the council's effort to develop information about the interaction between groundfish fisheries and tanner crab through a series of discussion papers. We believe the time has come to move forward with an analysis of alternatives that reduce trawling in important tanner crab grounds and reduce bycatch in both trawl and pot gear sectors."

Stock assessment surveys around Kodiak Island indicate the tanner crab population is rebuilding, presumably due to favorable environmental conditions, she said. Still, the total allowable catch for the directed tanner crab fishery around Kodiak Island for 2009 was 400,000 pounds, down 100,000 pounds from 2008, and down for a fourth consecutive year, she said.

Peterson noted that area crab biologists project promising recruitment and harvest two to three years from now.

"Present action is needed to support the anticipated population trend, particularly as crab move offshore," she said.

Margaret Bauman can be reached at margie.bauman@alaska

journal.com.