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Copyright © 2011 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance.
Bailey, K. M. 2011. An empty donut hole: the great collapse of a North American fishery. Ecology and
Society 16(2): 28. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss2/art28/

Insight

An Empty Donut Hole: the Great Collapse of a North American Fishery
Kevin M. Bailey 1

ABSTRACT.Walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma) is North America's most abundant and lucrative
natural fishery, and is the world’s largest fishery for human food. The little-known demise of the "Donut
Hole" stock of pollock in the Aleutian Basin of the central Bering Sea during the 1980s is the most spectacular
fishery collapse in North American history, dwarfing the famous crashes of the northern codand Pacific
sardine (Sardinops sagax). This collapse has received scant recognition and became evident only in 1993
when fishing was banned by an international moratorium; nearly 20 years later it has not recovered. The
history of fishing in the North Pacific Ocean after World War II offers some insights into how the Donut
Hole pollock fishery developed, and the societal and economicpressures behind it that so influenced the
stock’s fate. Overfishing was, without a doubt, the greatest contributor to the collapse of the Aleutian Basin
pollock fishery, but a lack of knowledge about population biocomplexity added to the confusion of how
to best manage the harvest. Unfortunately, the big scientific questions regarding the relationship of Donut
Hole fish to other stocks are stillunanswered.
Key Words: Aleutian Basin; Bering Sea; commercial fisheries; conservation; North Pacific; Theragra
chalcogramma; walleye pollock

INTRODUCTION
It was a blustery, gray day in February 1986, and I
was on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) research ship in the middle
of the commercial fleet fishing in the “Donut Hole”,
an international zone in the middleof the Bering
Sea between the coastal waters of the U.S. and
USSR (Fig. 1). I counted 60 large factory trawlers
around us belonging to four or five different nations.
They lined up in a pattern of several rows to take
turns dragging across a thin layer of Alaska pollock
at about 400 m depth, fishing with cavernous nets
that opened 45 m high for durations of several hours.
That year,the Donut Hole sustained a “reported”
winter catch of about 1 million tons. In hindsight, I
was witnessing the extirpation of pollock in the
Aleutian Basin.
Walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma), better
known as Alaska pollock, is North America’s most
abundant and lucrative fishery, making up about
40% of the total U.S. fisheries landings, with a gross
1

Alaska Fisheries ScienceCenter

value of more than U.S.$1 billion annually. It is the
world’s largest human food fishery. Pollock in the
eastern Bering Sea is considered to be one of the
world’s best managed populations due to the
observed stability in commercial landings
(Morrison et al. 2009). However, in spite of the best
efforts of harvest managers to engineer stability,
fisheries ebb and flow as their targetpopulations
cycle through periods of high and low abundance.
Recent red-flag news articles in The Economist
(2009) and Science (Morell 2009) expressed alarm
about the health of the major stock of pollock that
lives on the eastern Bering Sea shelf. Beyond the
shelf, the little-known rise and fall of the pollock
fishery in the Aleutian Basin (the deepwater
between the continental shelvesof Russia and
United States) of the central Bering Sea during the
1980s ranks among the most spectacular fishery
collapses to occur in the modern history of fisheries
in the northern hemisphere, sharing that dubious
honor with the coastal Norwegian spring spawning
herring collapse of the 1970s. How did this happen
and escape widespread attention?

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