Fishing area closed after coral-garden issue raised

State of Alaska officials opened new ocean waters off the remote Aleutian Islands for commercial fishing this week, only to immediately shut them down because they learned they are home to rare coral gardens that may be essential for some fish species.

The state had been trying to accommodate a small Aleutians fishing fleet that was left with mostly empty nets while fishermen in the nearby Bering Sea caught most of the season's Pacific cod from U.S. waters. The state controls fishing within three miles of shore.

But less than 24 hours after the area was opened, the environmental group Oceana informed the state that it was about to allow bottom trawlers — fishing boats that drag heavy nets across the sea floor — in an area so ecologically sensitive that federal fisheries managers had already taken steps to protect it.

"These were areas where coral gardens were so exquisite that the National Marine Fisheries Service had called them coral reserves," said Susan Murray, a spokeswoman for Oceana. "One pass of a trawler's net is all it takes to crush these corals, and some of them take hundreds of years to grow."

The depth and diversity of Alaska's coral gardens have only recently been discovered. But they have been altering commercial fishing in Alaska ever since.

Four years ago, scientists in a submersible dropped 1,200 feet below the ocean's surface off the tip of the Aleutian Islands chain and found more than 100 species of coral — from spiky yellow or pale-blue sponges to creatures that looked like tulips and spatulas, to vivid red corals shaped like Bonsai trees. They also found miles of coral that had been destroyed by trawl nets.

Scientists now believe the deep-sea corals and sponges may serve as important nurseries for fish, providing spawning and foraging areas, and giving smaller fish cover to hide from predators.

All the findings came just as the federal government released a report in 2004 saying the world's oceans were in trouble, and that more areas essential for fish populations needed to be kept off-limits to commercial fishing fleets.

Early in 2005, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the committee that oversees fishing in the U.S. waters off Alaska, agreed to halt trawling in coral-rich areas. The government also agreed to consider some of these areas as special ocean reserves, where no disturbance would be tolerated.

But regulations to that effect have not been written. So "the coral gardens just weren't considered," said Forrest Bowers, a groundfish biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Jim Ayers, Oceana's vice president, urged the state to immediately close 150 square miles of ocean to fishing, arguing that such an action would still leave plenty of water remaining to catch cod.

"Without these colonial animals of the deep, a vital component of the ecosystem and the fisheries it supports would be lost," he wrote to the Fish and Game Department.

Less than a day later, the state agreed.

"It had always been the state's intent to mirror the federal closures in those areas," Bowers said. "So we just decided to do it sooner rather than wait for the regulations."

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com