An Ill Tide Up North

"Fall down and you're history," says veterinarian Terry Springer as we crawl out on a rickety catwalk over a beach in Alaska's Pribilof Islands. Below us, thousands of fur seals flop around in a frenzy. The 600-lb. bulls herd their harems to protect them from rival males emerging from the brisk waters of the Bering Sea. As the big males toss the 110-lb. females around like beach toys, my first thought is that male fur seals have not yet embraced feminism. Springer, though, has no time for such anthropomorphic musing. The Colorado State University scientist is there to retrieve dead pups, which he gingerly extracts from the seal-covered shore by snagging them with a noose on a long pole. He'll take the tiny corpses back to a lab for autopsies. The work will tell him what ailed the pups when they died--and give him clues to the health of the entire fur-seal population.

That's not just academic information. For as the seals and other marine mammals go, so goes the whole Bering Sea ecosystem. Spanning the oceanic divide between the U.S. and Russia, it is one of the richest and most commercially productive marine environments on earth, teeming with pollack and halibut, fur seals and Steller's sea lions, horn puffins and murres. The seals and seabirds depend on catching fish, and so do humans. More than 2,000 boats from the U.S., Russia, Japan, Norway, China, Poland and the Koreas haul in an annual catch worth roughly $1 billion. The portion taken off the shores of Alaska alone amounts to one-half the sea life caught by commercial fishing vessels in U.S. waters.

But will the bounty last? Since the majority of the world's fisheries are in a state of collapse, as too many boats chase too few fish, conservationists fear the same fate for the Bering Sea, the last great refuge of marine abundance. Competition among countries for the rights to fish certain sectors of the sea is already fierce and could turn violent, as it has elsewhere in the world. The Russians have severely depleted fish stocks in their zone, and the international area open to all boats, called the Doughnut Hole, has been nearly stripped of commercial fish.

No species is more important to man and beast than pollack, the No. 1 ingredient of frozen fish sticks and the fish items served by chains like Burger King and Long John Silver. Each year the Bering Sea yields 4 billion lbs. of this bottom-dwelling creature, making the pollack business the biggest fish harvest in the world.

On the surface, that business is healthy: the pollack catch has stayed near record levels. But signs of overfishing and an ailing ecosystem can be seen higher up in the food chain. The fur-seal population has not increased despite a longstanding ban on commercial hunting. The number of Steller's sea lions, which feed mostly on pollack, has plunged 80% since the 1970s, and seabirds such as the red-legged kittiwake are also in trouble.